'Extraordinary... compelling' - Mail on Sunday
'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' - Sunday Times
The rediscovery of a forgotten masterpiece, The Broken House is a coming-of-age story that provides an unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis.
In 1965, journalist Horst Krüger 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 Krüger 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 Berlin suburb, among a community of decent, lower-middle-class homeowners. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God and obeyed the law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been,...