Sanderling - by Anne Weber (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How do you live with a history you cannot escape? What did it mean to be German one hundred years ago--and what does it mean today?

These questions lie at the heart of Sanderling, a classic work of literary inquiry by Anne Weber, one of Germany's leading contemporary authors. In this deeply personal and intellectually rigorous book, Weber journeys into the past to uncover the life of her great-grandfather Florens Christian Rang (1864-1924), whom she nicknames Sanderling after the darting shorebird.

A Protestant pastor in Prussian-ruled Poland, Rang served a church committed to the "Germanization" of the local population--an ideology that would later find horrific expression in the ambitions of the Third Reich. After leaving the church, Sanderling became part of the intellectual circles of Walter Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Martin Buber, joining writers, artists, and philosophers who dreamed of a utopian society. Yet his legacy is deeply conflicted: one of his sons--Weber's grandfather--would go on to become a Nazi.

Through close readings of letters and diaries and by traveling in her ancestor's footsteps across Poland, Weber traces a lineage marked by contradiction, moral crisis, reckoning, and rupture. Drawing on literary and philosophical touchstones such as Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and Friedrich Nietzsche, she weaves family history with a searching examination of ethics, responsibility, and memory.

Both a travel diary through time and a meditation on inherited guilt and identity, Sanderling reaches back into the past to better understand the present--and the burdens it carries.

"A searing examination of family and historical legacy, of how the past extends into the present." -- The Observer

Review Quotes

"A searing examination of family and historical legacy, of how the past extends into the present."--The Observer

"Sanderling is a rare book: meticulous, honest, unpretentious, interrogative, and utterly compelling." --Irish Examiner

"The past is not closed; it reaches into us." --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Anne Weber is an author, and a translator into both French and German. She studied in Paris and has worked for several publishers. She has written a dozen books, each in a German and French version. Her book Epic Annette has been translated into 15 languages and won the 2020 German Book Prize. She has also been awarded the Annette-von-Droste-Hülshoff-Preis and the Joseph-Breitbach-Preis.

Neil Blackadder translates prose and drama from German and French. His translations have been staged in London, New York and other cities, and he has received grants from the NEA, PEN, and the Howard Foundation.