Michael Bloch
They Must All Go Back to Potty Training
Wotan, My Enemy: Can Britain Live with the Germans in the European Union? An Autobiographical Response
By Leo Abse
Robson Books 274pp £18.95 order from our bookshop
‘The God of the Germans’, wrote Jung in a notorious essay of 1936 which was said to lend support to Nazi anti-Semitism, ‘is not the Christian God but Wotan.’ Leo Abse agrees. The leitmotiv of his profoundly disturbing and compulsively readable book is that a destructive aggressiveness, a Wagnerian megalomania, lurks at the root of the German psyche. Since 1945, the Germans have been struggling to repress these elements, but (as every psychologist knows) whatever is repressed tends to resurface sooner or later with a vengeance.
It is clear that a lifetime’s thought has gone into this book. Leo Abse had a German Jewish grandmother from Königsberg, and was brought up in a family in which German was spoken and German books were read. As a young man, he absorbed German socialist ideas and literature; as
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
We've extended our February offer for a week, meaning you can still get a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
Click below for details.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'McCarthy’s portrayal of a cosmos fashioned by God for killing and exploitation, in which angels, perhaps, are predators and paedophiles, is one that continues to haunt me.'
@holland_tom on reading Blood Meridian in the American west (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/devils-own-country
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis