Horst Krüger

Shaun Whiteside

Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt

A masterpiece. An astonishing piece of literature. Complex, heartfelt, vibrant, intense, urgent. A must read. I read it straight through to the last page and then wanted to read it all over again

Thomas Harding, bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf

The major rediscovery of a forgotten treasure. No book has ever so honestly evoked the wretched terror of life in Nazi Germany

James Hawes, author of The Shortest History of Germany

I often think that the key to a successful memoir is to find the right place to stand, the effective distance. Writing in the sixties, Kruger had enough clarity to see where his story fitted into the big picture, but he can still make the reader feel the passion, danger and grief. It is an unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster. There is no mercy from the author and no false hope, but he fills a gap in the historical imagination

A book of hard-won simplicity and quite beautiful precision

The book that broke the silence... the writing glowers from the page - sorrowful, disbelieving, chastened and yet not without hope... The Broken House... magnificently delivers

A fascinating and spine-chilling book

It is precisely the ordinariness of Krüger's life that makes this not just a book about Nazism and Germany but also a book for our own times... In an age when democracy is under threat everywhere...it's salutary to learn how one family, one indvidual among many, could stand by while evil triumphed... Krüger's limpid, almost poetic prose, well translated by Shaun Whiteside, conjures vivd, concrete images of the dullness of life in Eichkamp

The Broken House... stands out for Krüger's unsparing perceptions of the past and the sharpness and eloquence of his prose... It is Krüger's tone, stark and unforgiving, sometimes almost chillingly detached, that makes this memoir so interesting

Growing up Under Hitler – The Lost Masterpiece

'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times 
 
 'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary Mantel 
 
Twenty years after the end of the war, Horst Krüger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism. 
 
He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble. 
 
Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.

Horst Krüger

Praise for The Broken House

Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt

A masterpiece. An astonishing piece of literature. Complex, heartfelt, vibrant, intense, urgent. A must read. I read it straight through to the last page and then wanted to read it all over again

The major rediscovery of a forgotten treasure. No book has ever so honestly evoked the wretched terror of life in Nazi Germany

Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt

A masterpiece. An astonishing piece of literature. Complex, heartfelt, vibrant, intense, urgent. A must read. I read it straight through to the last page and then wanted to read it all over again

The major rediscovery of a forgotten treasure. No book has ever so honestly evoked the wretched terror of life in Nazi Germany

Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt

A masterpiece. An astonishing piece of literature. Complex, heartfelt, vibrant, intense, urgent. A must read. I read it straight through to the last page and then wanted to read it all over again

The major rediscovery of a forgotten treasure. No book has ever so honestly evoked the wretched terror of life in Nazi Germany

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