At the start of his biography of Reinhard Heydrich, Robert Gerwarth, professor of modern history at University College Dublin, muses on the challenge of writing about an individual who is ‘repellent’ and ‘strangely distant’. He opts for the strategy of ‘cold empathy’, engaging his subject with ‘critical distance’ while attempting to assess his behaviour in context rather than in the light of what we know it led to. This approach, in contrast to the sensational popular biographies, produces some genuine surprises.

Literary Review

Oct 2011

Categories

David Cesarani

Defies Any Parallel

Reading with Primo

Tales of Degradation and Despair

A Chronicle of Suffering and Spirituality

Tormented At The End

Violence and Vegetarianism

The Eagle & the Prophet

Scions of the Survivors

The Germs of Genocide

Knowing When To Run

The Argentine Connection

‘Living Crematorium’

Out Of The Mud

Before the Storm

‘Berlin In Arabic’

Never Again?

The Fuhrer’s Mouthpiece

Man of Many Faces

Passive Resistance

Testimony

Oskar’s Story

Striped Pyjamas

The Root of Conflict

Lethal Indifference