A magnificent book that through telling the story of a family who resisted Hitler captures those strange years from the 1920s to the end of the war

At the end of The Silences of the Hammerstein, his magnificent biography of the family of Kurt von Hammerstein, the head of the German army when Hitler came to power, the leading German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger explains in four short chapters “Why this book is not a novel.” That the book contains many posthumous conversations between Enzensberger and characters in the book tends to undermine his claim, but the book is a hybrid of history and fiction. Enzensberger may undermine his book further when he writes: “Even though this is not a novel, this work does not make scholarly claims.” The explanation by Enzensberger of why his book is not a novel includes this powerful description of the impossibility of history from J L Motley, a 19th century American historian: “Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true. The annals of mankind have never been written; never can be written; nor would it be within human capacity to read them if they were written. We have a leaf or two from the…