Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
This is a collection of essays that gives you an idea of the sheer breadth of her work – the mass murderers who she met after the end of the Second World War, when it was becoming clear what they had done. How could they? All these cultured, educated Germans, how could they? Gitta’s work is so important because she keeps a record of what those people said and the lies that they told.
Your last book is history: Gitta Sereny’s The German Trauma.
This is a collection of essays that tells her wonderful story, her extraordinary story, and it gives you an idea of the sheer breadth of the work that she did on Nazi Germany and all of the people she knew and knew really well – the mass murderers who she met after the end of the Second World War, when it was becoming clear what they had done. How could they? All these cultured, educated Germans, how could they?
And we learn quite a lot through Gitta about those individual Germans and how their acceptance of Hitler and their lies developed. In Why We Lie I’ve written quite a lot about those lies. Gitta’s work is so important because she keeps a record of what those people said and the lies that they told.
Lies to conceal their own complicity and to save their own skins?
And to prove, even it’s only to Gitta, a young woman journalist, that they weren’t the terrible person that everybody says they are. From her book and the book by Robert J Lifton about the Nazi doctors, you can see that when we tell lies to ourselves we get further and further away from reality until we can no longer tell what is real and what is fantasy.
This collection covers everything that happened after the war and it is really interesting to see how Germany has changed now. When Mark Mardell left Europe to become the BBC’s North America editor, on his blog on the BBC website he said, ‘Germany is the most mature country I know.’ Now, whatever the Germans were, around Hitler they weren’t mature. But people do change, and peoples change. To appreciate the extent of this change you have to read Gitta – then you can see how they can now produce such reasonable people as Angela Merkel, with her lovely little smile and her jackets. She’s not possessed by a fantasy.
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Dorothy Rowe is a psychologist famous for her groundbreaking and bestselling books on overcoming depression. Her recents subjects include phobias, sibling relationships and structures of belief. In her next book, Why We Lie, she explores the importance and dangers of our fantasies. ‘Interpretations are impressions,’ she says. ‘They are all guesses and theories, and they can easily be invalidated. When you come up against a major invalidation, such as happened to Alan Greenspan when the financial system was threatened with collapse, you simply feel yourself falling apart. Greenspan aged terribly during that period.’
