Invisible Country

Stephan Wackwitz’s family never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century’s greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade. With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in ‘An Invisible Country’, a learned meditation on twentieth-century German history as viewed through the prism of one family’s story. Writing of his grandfather (born in 1893), his father (1922), and himself (1952), Wackwitz places himself in the historical and emotional landscape of the ‘invisible country’ surrounding Anhalt in Upper Silesia, a town ten kilometres from Auschwitz, and the site of his grandfather’s Lutheran pastorate from 1921 to 1933.