The Burden of Hitler's Legacy
In this sequel to his first autobiographical work, A Child of Hitler, Alfons Heck continues his story, but with the overarching aim of demonstrating that Germans themselves, and most notably the young people, were also victimized by Hitler's madness. With great sensitivity and narrative force, Heck recounts how he, as a youth with Jewish friends and anti-Nazi family members, was nevertheless transformed into a Nazi fanatic like so many of his peers. He does a wonderful job of interweaving his personal narrative with that of general historical events, so that one can fully appreciate the paradox of his rising in the ranks of the Hitler Youth, ultimately to be decorated by Hitler himself, precisely at the time Germany was going down to defeat. From that last moment, as Heck tells it, he undertook a personal quest to understand the forces that led to the disaster and to his own transformation. The book reveals how Heck began to find and, eventually, reached a broadened historical self-consciousness in the wake of Germany's ruin; in short, it describes his evolving and personal denazification. This book is to be applauded for its refreshing candor and trenchant insights, even if sometimes thoughts and feelings attributed to -the young Heck seem to be retrospective inserts by an older and more mature person. It makes for absorbing, even chilling reading, as one sees again the electric magnetism of Hitler and how it came to be institutionalized by the Hitler Youth, resulting in teenage power run amok. Heck immigrated to Canada, then to the United States, where for the last seven years, he has appeared at community forums, universities, and media events, frequently with Helen Waterford, a Jewish holocaust survivor. The last chapters portraying the often hostile reactions to their joint appearances and the kinds of questions and answers they have received underscore the enormous difficulties contemporaries still have in confronting Nazism. Was Heck equally a victim as was Helen Waterford? In the final analysis, that is the burden of this book. --FromIndependent Publisher--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.