Alexander Münninghoff (1944–2020)

In this Dutch lawyer/journalist's memoir/biography, Mr. Münninghoff writes his family history in the years before and after World War II in Latvia, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It's a tragic story, full of family secrets and petty (and not so petty) family divisions. It's a story with no heroes and plenty of misguided bad actors. When Münninghoff was four, he found an SS's officer's helmet in the attic and thus learned his father had been a German SS officer on the Eastern Front, who, while loving Russian people, hated the Bolsheviks and enlisted for that reason. The father (Franz) is a trainwreck, with many failings; his grandfather, Joan, was a self-righteous, rich, shrewd businessman who was supremely capable of negotiating his way through the complex political scene in Europe both before and after the war, who calls himself a Catholic but belittles, betrays, and beleaguers everyone around him on his ruthless quest for wealth. On a larger scale, the book chronicles the decline of the old Prussian, Russian, and Baltic aristocracies, political corruption, what we would call today Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, political corruption, and the economic and political realities of Europe from the 1930s forward. More personally, it also chronicles the story of a dysfunctional family, alcoholism, drug addiction, family feuds, exploitation, adultery, kidnapping, poverty, hippie communes, loneliness, suicide, and, somewhat, redemption. I learned that the English translation of this novel was published posthumously on August 1, 2020, three months after Münninghoff died. It's a difficult, interesting story, but rambling at times and full of long supposed "stories" (in quotes) told by family members, which seems impossible, as Münninghoff claimed to be recounting oral stories told to him in his youth or early adulthood. One suspects this future journalist was not sitting there with his reporter's notebook or a tape recorder at the time when these tales were told, so the quotes were somewhat off-putting, long, rambling, and generally not very credible, but they did convey the points he was trying to make. That is the biggest criticism I had; the other was that, largely because Münninghoff wrote this as a reporter, his descriptions of things that happened in his family seemed far too cold and detached. I was most fascinated learning about Franz's motivations for joining the SS.… (mais)