Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

[A] deeply powerful book. It is a work of scholarship that intersperses critical analysis of movies, photographs, and memoirs of the period with Sollors’s own personal memories of being a frightened child, fleeing Silesia with his mother through a bombed-out and chaotic Germany in 1945… The Temptation of Despair belongs among the most distinguished German reckonings with its own past. Like Sebald, Sollors will have nothing to do with another kind of German reckoning—the lachrymose revanchism of the German right who seem so astonishingly indifferent to the sufferings they inflicted, so woundingly alive only to their own… The Temptation of Despair paints a picture of a society in ruins and a people at the edge of psychic collapse. But it is also a story of temptation overcome. The destroyed cities were rebuilt brick by brick, the refugee wanderers found homes and new lives… [A] wrenching book.

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

[A] deeply powerful book. It is a work of scholarship that intersperses critical analysis of movies, photographs, and memoirs of the period with Sollors’s own personal memories of being a frightened child, fleeing Silesia with his mother through a bombed-out and chaotic Germany in 1945… The Temptation of Despair belongs among the most distinguished German reckonings with its own past. Like Sebald, Sollors will have nothing to do with another kind of German reckoning—the lachrymose revanchism of the German right who seem so astonishingly indifferent to the sufferings they inflicted, so woundingly alive only to their own… The Temptation of Despair paints a picture of a society in ruins and a people at the edge of psychic collapse. But it is also a story of temptation overcome. The destroyed cities were rebuilt brick by brick, the refugee wanderers found homes and new lives… [A] wrenching book.

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

[A] deeply powerful book. It is a work of scholarship that intersperses critical analysis of movies, photographs, and memoirs of the period with Sollors’s own personal memories of being a frightened child, fleeing Silesia with his mother through a bombed-out and chaotic Germany in 1945… The Temptation of Despair belongs among the most distinguished German reckonings with its own past. Like Sebald, Sollors will have nothing to do with another kind of German reckoning—the lachrymose revanchism of the German right who seem so astonishingly indifferent to the sufferings they inflicted, so woundingly alive only to their own… The Temptation of Despair paints a picture of a society in ruins and a people at the edge of psychic collapse. But it is also a story of temptation overcome. The destroyed cities were rebuilt brick by brick, the refugee wanderers found homes and new lives… [A] wrenching book.