Carole Angier
A Brutal Blankness
The Dead Man in the Bunker: Discovering My Father
By Martin Pollack (Translated by William Hobson)
Faber & Faber 216pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
Martin Pollack must be a very nice man. But nice men can’t write good books, especially about Nazism. To write a good book you must be prepared to lose everything – family, friends, even yourself – for the sake of your readers. The Dead Man in the Bunker sacrifices its readers for Pollack’s family instead. It doesn’t discover his father, as it promises, or anyone else either. It will tell us a few things we didn’t know about the historical background, for example what fertile ground for Hitler some of Austria was. But that’s about all.
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