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Book Reviews: Or, survivors tales
Aug. 13th, 2011 05:03 pmI read two very different books recently, both compelling sort-of-memoirs written by women but about utterly different subjects.
Patentöchter ("Goddaughters") by Julia Albrecht and Corinna Ponto is a dialogue in letters that deals with an incredible painful mixture of family and history. In the so-called "German Autumn" (well, we refer to it as der deutsche Herbst, no idea whether anyone outside of Germany does) of 1977, one of the most shocking acts by the RAF (that's not the Royal Airforce but the Rote Armee Fraktion, aka the Baader-Meinhoff-Gang for English speaking people) was the murder of banker Jürgen Ponto for the way in which it happened. The three terrorists that visited his house could do so because one of them, Susanne Albrecht, was the daughter of dear friends. She called him "Uncle". He was the godfather of her younger sister, Julia (one of the authors of the book), just as her father had been the godfather of his own daughter, Corinna (the other author of the book). Not that surprisingly, all contact between the families ended shortly after the murder, until recently when the two women started to correspond.
An ongoing issue for the families of the victims here in Germany is that generally the media (whether we're talking newspapers, biographies or fictional media, like films or tv shows) pay far more attention to the terrorists. (The director of one of the more recent films, Der Baader-Meinhoff-Complex, went as far as admit that to him the victims were "dull".) Yet in the case of this particular murder, the two stories, of the victim and (one of) the killer(s), are inextricably intertwined. It makes for very raw emotional reading, with both women coming across as trying to be as honest as they can of what it felt like to lose your father because of such a betrayal, to live with the fact that your adored older sister murdered your godfather. The searching for explanations, rationalizations: Julia's parents and Julia herself clung to the hope that Susanne had been blackmailed/was already repentant, only to discover that when she was arrested 13 years later that actually neither had been the case. Meanwhile, Corinna is downright obsessed with proving that the entire RAF and their 70s actions were part of a conspiracy of secret services, primarily the East German one, and increasingly bitter with every RAF terrorist released from prison or statements that "it's hard to be sorry for the fat cats" (by which victims like her father the banker were meant), a statement that came from our former secretary of foreign affairs, Joschka Fischer. And then there are the memories of the time before, when her father was still alive and Julia's sister - whom she can't bring herself to call by her name and only refers to as S. - was visiting for non-lethal reasons, or, from Julia's side of the childhood where she now wonders how real her memories are at all. There is the memory of hero-worshipping her older sister and Susanne being protective and close to her, and the reality of seeing Susanne, now talking with a Saxonian accent after years in the GDR, seeing her again as an adult and telling her indifferently "I had almost forgotten you existed". If you can read German, a highly recommend book.
A story of the 70s (and last two years of the 60s) in a very different vein is Chris O'Dell's Miss O'Dell (with the lengthy subtitle "Hard days and long nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton and the women they loved"). The subtitle is a bit sensational, which wouldn't have been necessary because it really is a compelling story, unusual and most interesting among similar books because the boys in the band(s) are really only part of the subject; our narrator's intense friendships with two of their wives, Pattie Boyd and Maureen Starkey, are given as much narrative space and importance as George, Ringo, Mick 'n Keith (and far more than Bob who shows up, is being enigmatic, has a random one night stand and leaves) et al. Chris O'Dell started to work for the Beatles' Apple Company when it was new, during the brief idealistic period before things went to hell in a hand basket, toured with the Stones (she's also the woman on the Exile on Main Street cover), had a front row seat to the collapse of the Harrison and Starkey marriages (and is the subject of George Harrison's song, Miss O'Dell), the later of which she was involved with, managed tours for Linda Ronstadt and had a rueful friendly rivalry with Joni Mitchell - she's basically a female Forrest Gump of the late 60s and throughout the 70s. As opposed to Forrest, this was not conductive to her health. She already did drugs before she ever met her first rock star, but by the mid 70s she snorted enough daily cocaine to impress Keith Richards (but as opposed to Richards couldn't afford the doctors to clean up her blood). Being slapped around by a drug dealer is a wake-up call but it doesn't last long, and as opposed to how a Hollywood movie would go, marriage with an English aristocrat is anything but a happy ending (he turns out to be an addict as well, which I say didn't exactly surprise me; blame my Jacobin father), though after leaving him she does get her life back together again.
( Details and quotes under the cut )
Patentöchter ("Goddaughters") by Julia Albrecht and Corinna Ponto is a dialogue in letters that deals with an incredible painful mixture of family and history. In the so-called "German Autumn" (well, we refer to it as der deutsche Herbst, no idea whether anyone outside of Germany does) of 1977, one of the most shocking acts by the RAF (that's not the Royal Airforce but the Rote Armee Fraktion, aka the Baader-Meinhoff-Gang for English speaking people) was the murder of banker Jürgen Ponto for the way in which it happened. The three terrorists that visited his house could do so because one of them, Susanne Albrecht, was the daughter of dear friends. She called him "Uncle". He was the godfather of her younger sister, Julia (one of the authors of the book), just as her father had been the godfather of his own daughter, Corinna (the other author of the book). Not that surprisingly, all contact between the families ended shortly after the murder, until recently when the two women started to correspond.
An ongoing issue for the families of the victims here in Germany is that generally the media (whether we're talking newspapers, biographies or fictional media, like films or tv shows) pay far more attention to the terrorists. (The director of one of the more recent films, Der Baader-Meinhoff-Complex, went as far as admit that to him the victims were "dull".) Yet in the case of this particular murder, the two stories, of the victim and (one of) the killer(s), are inextricably intertwined. It makes for very raw emotional reading, with both women coming across as trying to be as honest as they can of what it felt like to lose your father because of such a betrayal, to live with the fact that your adored older sister murdered your godfather. The searching for explanations, rationalizations: Julia's parents and Julia herself clung to the hope that Susanne had been blackmailed/was already repentant, only to discover that when she was arrested 13 years later that actually neither had been the case. Meanwhile, Corinna is downright obsessed with proving that the entire RAF and their 70s actions were part of a conspiracy of secret services, primarily the East German one, and increasingly bitter with every RAF terrorist released from prison or statements that "it's hard to be sorry for the fat cats" (by which victims like her father the banker were meant), a statement that came from our former secretary of foreign affairs, Joschka Fischer. And then there are the memories of the time before, when her father was still alive and Julia's sister - whom she can't bring herself to call by her name and only refers to as S. - was visiting for non-lethal reasons, or, from Julia's side of the childhood where she now wonders how real her memories are at all. There is the memory of hero-worshipping her older sister and Susanne being protective and close to her, and the reality of seeing Susanne, now talking with a Saxonian accent after years in the GDR, seeing her again as an adult and telling her indifferently "I had almost forgotten you existed". If you can read German, a highly recommend book.
A story of the 70s (and last two years of the 60s) in a very different vein is Chris O'Dell's Miss O'Dell (with the lengthy subtitle "Hard days and long nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton and the women they loved"). The subtitle is a bit sensational, which wouldn't have been necessary because it really is a compelling story, unusual and most interesting among similar books because the boys in the band(s) are really only part of the subject; our narrator's intense friendships with two of their wives, Pattie Boyd and Maureen Starkey, are given as much narrative space and importance as George, Ringo, Mick 'n Keith (and far more than Bob who shows up, is being enigmatic, has a random one night stand and leaves) et al. Chris O'Dell started to work for the Beatles' Apple Company when it was new, during the brief idealistic period before things went to hell in a hand basket, toured with the Stones (she's also the woman on the Exile on Main Street cover), had a front row seat to the collapse of the Harrison and Starkey marriages (and is the subject of George Harrison's song, Miss O'Dell), the later of which she was involved with, managed tours for Linda Ronstadt and had a rueful friendly rivalry with Joni Mitchell - she's basically a female Forrest Gump of the late 60s and throughout the 70s. As opposed to Forrest, this was not conductive to her health. She already did drugs before she ever met her first rock star, but by the mid 70s she snorted enough daily cocaine to impress Keith Richards (but as opposed to Richards couldn't afford the doctors to clean up her blood). Being slapped around by a drug dealer is a wake-up call but it doesn't last long, and as opposed to how a Hollywood movie would go, marriage with an English aristocrat is anything but a happy ending (he turns out to be an addict as well, which I say didn't exactly surprise me; blame my Jacobin father), though after leaving him she does get her life back together again.
( Details and quotes under the cut )
