Invisible Country

Stephan Wackwitzs family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the centurys greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in An Invisible Country, a learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one familys story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the invisible country surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometres from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfathers Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.