Life's a funny old thing.
In any event, I know more about German history and political philosophy than the average children's literature write in America, and the one thing I've learned is that I can easily (easily!) jettison most of what I know.
Forget das Niebelungenlied.
Nix Goethe. * Max Planck?** Pfft!
But I'll have to keep my old university notes on the Nazis, worst luck. This makes me cranky. I don't like the Nazis. National Socialism was a communal psychosis on the part of the German people, who forgot that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men do nothing. Of course, it's crucial to understand history in order not to repeat it, which is why Nazis get such an ocean of dramatized ink in children's literature.***
Still, I'd rather read about Beethoven or Bertholt Brecht any day,**** so most of the time I give Nazi books a miss. For some reason, though***** I picked up a copy of Then, by Morris Gleitzman.
In my usual ends-before-the-means, I read Then before Once. It works as a stand alone---it works, in fact on just about every level: voice, character, story.******
Read this book!
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*Licht! Mehr Licht!
**a founding father of quantum physics alongside that other guy---you know, the other German guy...oh, what was his name? Albert Einstein?
***This is by no means an exhaustive list. And it's an older one too, missing several newer books such as The Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen...and the ones I'm gonna talk about!
****Kepler gives me a headache, though.
*****It was the cover. The cover's perfect.
******A small quibble: the story has a bit of the composite-of-incidents feel so common in well-researched historical fiction----you know, where the story feels strung together out of vignettes culled from archived letters attached to the footnotes found in Appendix B of Authoritative Tome on the History of the Germanic Peoples, Volume 27---das dritte Reich.
But the characters! Ah, Gleitzman's characters certainly make up for any appendixed story-boarding! A very wonderful book.
