What do you think?
Rate this book
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 20, 2024
Heinz Knobloch was East Germany’s most popular newspaper columnist — not a political commentator, but more like a critic of everyday life, called a “Feuilletonist.” He wrote a number of books about Berlin history, usually centered on a little-known historical figure like Mathilde Jacob, the secretary of Rosa Luxemburg, or Sally Epstein, executed for the murder of Horst Wessel. Knobloch’s storytelling jumps back and forth in time, covering his walks through the city, the historical subject, and random stuff in between. It’s charming and untranslatable.
I had read all of Knobloch’s monographs except for this one. Why? Because this book is dedicated to is a cop. „The Courageous Precinct Captain“ tells the story Wilhelm Krützfeld, the police chief at Hackescher Markt in central Berlin. On November 9, 1938, when Nazis were burning down synagogues and smashing windows of Jewish-owned shops across Germany, Krützfeld and his men went to the New Synagogue, the biggest Jewish house of worship in the country, and drove the fascists out before calling the fire department. Today, the New Synagogue is a ruin, but it actually survived the Nazi pogroms — it was destroyed by British bombs in 1943. Krützfeld was one of a number of Prussian cops who warned Jews about deportations. I don’t really like these “good cop” stories, because they tend to distract from the fact the vast majority of German police were willing agents of fascism.
Yet: This book doesn’t actually include that much about Krützfeld — it’s centered on Jewish people and the neighborhood they inhabited. The best chapter is about East Berlin youth who drunkenly knocked over tombstones at a Jewish cemetery in early 1988. The authorities initially tried to cover this up, but the teenagers went back several times to destroy even more ancient gravestones. Knobloch attended the trial and noted that the youth all looked respectable by the conservative standards of East German Stalinism. It was punks, whose clothing Knobloch found indescribably strange, who testified against the wrongdoers, out of antifascist conviction. Knobloch, the humanistic conscience of the East German regime, was calling for some sympathy for persecuted youth cultures.
So don’t judge a book by its cover. I didn’t like the cover but I loved the book. I immediately went on a walking tour around Hackescher Markt.
I had read all of Knobloch’s monographs except for this one. Why? Because this book is dedicated to is a cop. „The Courageous Precinct Captain“ tells the story Wilhelm Krützfeld, the police chief at Hackescher Markt in central Berlin. On November 9, 1938, when Nazis were burning down synagogues and smashing windows of Jewish-owned shops across Germany, Krützfeld and his men went to the New Synagogue, the biggest Jewish house of worship in the country, and drove the fascists out before calling the fire department. Today, the New Synagogue is a ruin, but it actually survived the Nazi pogroms — it was destroyed by British bombs in 1943. Krützfeld was one of a number of Prussian cops who warned Jews about deportations. I don’t really like these “good cop” stories, because they tend to distract from the fact the vast majority of German police were willing agents of fascism.
Yet: This book doesn’t actually include that much about Krützfeld — it’s centered on Jewish people and the neighborhood they inhabited. The best chapter is about East Berlin youth who drunkenly knocked over tombstones at a Jewish cemetery in early 1988. The authorities initially tried to cover this up, but the teenagers went back several times to destroy even more ancient gravestones. Knobloch attended the trial and noted that the youth all looked respectable by the conservative standards of East German Stalinism. It was punks, whose clothing Knobloch found indescribably strange, who testified against the wrongdoers, out of antifascist conviction. Knobloch, the humanistic conscience of the East German regime, was calling for some sympathy for persecuted youth cultures.
So don’t judge a book by its cover. I didn’t like the cover but I loved the book. I immediately went on a walking tour around Hackescher Markt.
Displaying 1 of 1 review