Fighting the Darkness

The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfather's Secret Past and How Hitler Seduced a Generation by Martin Davidson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first heard about Martin Davidson's book, 'The Perfect Nazi', when someone, knowing we had been English students in the same college 40 years ago, pointed it out to me. Since those days Martin and I have waved at each other across the Twitter oceans from time to time, but otherwise followed divergent paths, he in television, me in writing. Thinking back to our three years of university friendship, I could not recall Martin ever once mentioning having a grandfather who fought for ‘the other side’ in the Second World War, or even the fact of being half German. I was intrigued.

There is always an extra frisson in reading a book written by someone you know, or once knew. If that book is autobiographical as opposed to fictional, then that extra curiosity is all the more intense, sometimes to the point of blurring the ability to be objective. One paragraph into Davidson’s extraordinary quest to discover the truth about his German grandfather however, and any question of knowing the author or not became irrelevant. The prose – lucid, intelligent, candid – sweeps you along with its power; and the journey it pursues is riveting.

The background and starting point for the story is that Martin and his sister grew up in the shadows of not-knowing the full story of the German side of their family. Any questions about what their maternal grandfather, a dentist called Bruno Langbehn, did in the Second World War were always side-stepped and stone-walled, creating the sense of forbidden territory which children are so good at accepting. It was after university, entering fully into his own adulthood, that Davidson first began to want more answers about his still living, assertive, charismatic grandparent. It wasn’t until the death of Bruno however, by which time Davidson’s own television work had started to involve research into subjects related to the Third Reich, that his quest for the truth began in earnest. What had Bruno, a dentist, twice married, a robust survivor, really done in the war, and why?

It is not a comfortable journey. Davidson is brutally honest, both about his unsettling discoveries and his growing personal unease at what he is unearthing. My heart went out to him as I read, although Davidson himself is not out for compassion. His quest is to unearth the truth in all its ugliness. With the help of his sister, he digs tirelessly into the past, unravelling details about Bruno’s upbringing, plucking forgotten scraps from archives and placing it all in the geo-political context of the times. The picture he finally pieces together offers a difficult, and utterly credible, explanation both of his grandfather’s forceful personality and the choices he made.

I will let the book speak for itself in terms of Davidson’s ultimate findings. Suffice it to say, they are shocking. They also constitute the most cogent and compelling analysis of the forces at play in the build-up of the Nazi party and the outbreak of war that I have ever come across. For Davidson’s objective is not just to unearth the truth, but to make sense of it. And it seems to me that this is a deeply redeeming element both of the book and of any attempt to confront evil. For it is only by daring to understand our capacity for darkness, picking apart its origins and motives, that we can ever hope to win the fight to prevent its re-emergence.




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