Origins

'Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it.' So writes Reiner Schurmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schurmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness, too, are the burden of a cruel collective past. His story presents itself as a continuous quest for-and struggle to free himself from-his origins. The hero is haunted relentlessly by his fractured identity-in his childhood at his father's factory, where he learns of the Nazi past through a horrible discovery; in an Israeli kibbutz, where, after a few months of happiness, he is thrown out for being a German; in postwar Freiburg, where he reencounters a friend who escaped the Nazi concentration camps; and finally, in the United States, where his attempts at a fresh start almost fail to exorcise the ghosts of the past.Originally published in French in 1976, Origins was the winner of the coveted Prix Broquette-Gonin of the Academie Francaise. In close collaboration with the author, this meticulously crafted translation was created in the early 1990s, but Schurmann s premature death in 1993 prevented its publication process and, as a result, one of the most important literary accounts of the conflicted process of coming to terms with the Holocaust and Germany s Nazi past has been unavailable to English readers until now. Candid and frank, filled with fury and caustic sarcasm, Origins offers insight into a generation caught between disappointment and rage, alignment and rebellion, guilt and obsession with the past.