Click on image to buy from Amazon.ComThe Holocaust is a dark star, forever pulling new writers into its orbit. First-time novelist Hattemer-Higgins dramatizes with phantasmagoric magnitude the crisis of conscience following the genocide, drawing on her experience working in Berlin as a walking-tour guide, a role she assigns to her protagonist. An American with a German father, Margaret Taub has survived a mysterious trauma that has erased her memory of recent months and left her afflicted with nightmarish visions. As she ushers tourists to Nazi sites, the city turns to flesh before her eyes, and Nazi Madga Goebbels, who murdered her children as military defeat loomed, stalks her in the form of a bird of prey. Margaret is also visited by the ghost of a Jewish woman who committed suicide after killing her children to save them from Nazi torture.
Determined to regain her past, Margaret contends with a blind, knife-throwing “memory surgeon” and a spying neighbor. She knows she’s guilty, but of what? With unbridled imagination and exquisite command, Hattemer-Higgins explodes the concept of remembrance and confronts the “spiritual aftershock” of the Holocaust in a gloriously hellish and fiercely surreal dreamscape with echoes of fairy tales, Heinrich von Kleist, and Hermann Hesse, to create a bewitching and unnerving novel stunning in its artistry, audacity, and insight. –Donna Seaman, Booklist
The History of History is a great read, a wonderful first novel. It’s also a hard-working, ungimmicky, well-wrought book. These days every blogger can have a printout of his blogs stuck between two pieces of cardboard, wrapped up in a wax paper jacket and raced to Barnes & Noble so fast the publisher doesn’t have time to include Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, much less edit the damn thing. But this is a book into which the author obviously put care, passion, and, I will argue, authenticity.
This is a novel about an American who guides walking tours in Berlin, a city where the only history is Nazi history. One of the many oddities of contemporary Germany is that the concentration camps, the Hitler Bunker and other destinations are haunted by people who used to live and work there. They’re all of retirement age now, and so they hang out for attention, for money, or just because they have nothing better to do. There are the old survivors, the old storm troopers, and the old crazies, and it’s often not easy to tell the difference. One self-declared Dachau inmate in 1994 was enough for me, but Ida Hattemer-Higgins made her living in this twilight world for several years. Imagine a waxworks of horrors, with the real-life horrors regularly dropping in to visit. A Grand-Guignol theater with special guest performances by reanimated cadavers, real killers, and crazy people who think they died or think they killed. Imagine working there for a good long while. And imagine the whole country is a little bit like working there: ubiquitous, minor, passing, forgivable, utterly understandable complicity. Proud little stories. I won’t give away anything from the book, but I heard one of my own, Grandpa G?nther served in the Ukraine, so of course when the bakery lady fainted from the heat, he jumped over the counter, picked her up and raced her to safety. You know, like she was his Wehrmacht comrade, and another village was burning. And then there’s the general uncanny atavistic ferality in the Teuton air, the self-seriousness of the nation of Mercedes-Benz, descended from the inconceivable brutality of the Thirty Years War and farther back, from the barbarians who lived naked in lightless forests, terrified Tacitus, had no land, only cattle, and chopped more than one Roman general and emperor into very small pieces.
The effect of this country and this employment on an impressionable and literary young lady from Cincinnati? Delirium. Fantasy and reality can blend, especially when reality is the worse of the two. My own experiences, my reading of the book and my sense of the author’s tenor at a reading I was lucky enough to attend — all these things convince me that The History of History is a veiled work of creative non-fiction in the tradition of the New Journalism. The prose is better than real life, but the rest strikes me as just about right.
What we have here, then, is a fascinating real story that goes way off the Holocaust reservation. There are set rules in what we American Jews call “Shoah Business.” It has a lot to do with US ethnic identity and US foreign policy, and stands at some distance — a voyeuristic, bloodlustful, perverse yet quite comfortable distance — from fact. The American literary tradition of Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Littell and other perpetrators is now half a century old, and grafts sloppy yet ostentatious research and the absence of knowledge of basic German onto picture-book fakeries. Steven Spielberg meets the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa. One story in Ozick’s Pagan Rabbi, for example, has a German narrator talking about Ozick’s Upper East Side fantasy Holocaust and referring to his sister as “Margaretchen.” The protagonist of The History of History is named Margaret. And among other ways in which Ida Hattemer-Higgins surpasses, with her debut novel, Cynthia Ozick’s collected works is that Ida Hattemer-Higgins knows that the diminutive of Margarethe is Gretchen.
The History of History adopts no politics, and so will not be defended by the political left, historically the only group to have undertaken an objective look at fascism. Yet it is a book worth defending. It powerfully tells a recognizable real story about an eternal theme, going mad because the world is mad. It is a beautiful book, a vulnerable book; see for yourself. – LLM 2007, Amazon.Com Customer Review
The Washington Post Book World – February 19, 2011 (Excerpt)
Berlin, the least storied of the great European capitals, not much more than an oversize village as late as the 18th century, is today one of the most vibrant cities on the continent, though it has a ferocious 20th-century past: Nazi headquarters, Allied aerial bombardment, destruction by the Russians at the end of World War II and its walled-in existence during the Cold War.
Although Ida Hattemer-Higgins’s “The History of History” is a novel, it’s also a virtual guide to the city, as its subtitle suggests. The protagonist, Margaret Taub, is an American history student at the Free University, working part time as a guide for English-speaking tourists. The painstaking detail of her narrative map of Berlin and the plausible, often amusing reactions of her customers to her explanations of the sites form the realistic side of the novel. The other side is a fantasy about the merging of past and present, beginning with Margaret’s partial amnesia when she wakes one morning in a forest and has forgotten what happened to her in the past few months. [Read the full article...]
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Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]
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