TEHRAN – Iranian literati will come together in a session on Saturday at the Book City Institute in Tehran to attend a review of German writer Horst Kruger’s autobiography “The Broken House: Growing up Under Hitler”.

A Persian translation by Minu Lalroshan has recently been published by Tarh-e No in Tehran. 

The review session will open at 3 pm and also be screened live on www.instagram.com/ketabofarhang and www.instagram.com/bookcityculturalcenter.

It will be attended by Lalroshan and critics Narjes Khodai and Mohammad Ragheb.

The autobiographical debut novel was originally published in 1966.

In 1965, journalist Horst Kruger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men, women and children.

The trial sent Kruger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand “how it really was, that incomprehensible time.”

He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism.

He had been “the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work.” With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble.

Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, “The Broken House” is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.

Photo: A poster for a review of Horst Kruger’s book “The Broken House: Growing up Under Hitler”.
 
MMS/YAW