TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 6/27/97: The Undertaking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade By Thomas Lynch Nonfiction 6/26/97: Steven Spielberg: A Biography By Joseph Mcbride Nonfiction 6/25/97: Almost No Memory By Lydia Davis Fiction 6/24/97: Patient By Ben Watt Nonfiction 6/23/97: Women With Men: Three Stories By Richard Ford Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: No more magic realism By Alberto Fuguet A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

tearing the silence : __on being german in America BY URSULA HEGI SIMON & SCHUSTER 302 PAGES NONFICTION BY SALLY ECKHOFF the way most people see it, being part-German -- or, God forbid, all German -- is like having pit bulls in your ancestry: a misshapen talent for aggression precedes you, even if you're just a pup. German-born Americans are simply not at the top of the list of people we feel sorry for these days. But as Ursula Hegi proves in this earnest and dry book, probing the pain and confusion of Germans who were young when Hitler was in power can help distill a missing ingredient in our understanding of human tragedy. In "Tearing the Silence," Hegi, author of the acclaimed novel "Stones From the River," flies coast-to-coast, gathering testimony from adults who were once connected with Hitler's legacy, however incidentally, through their parents. Each interviewee gets his or her own chapter. The stories differ from one another strikingly, but for the most part they share a common element: shame for the sins of their fathers. "It's my heritage, yet I had no say in it," says Hans-Peter, born in 1945 and living on American soil by the age of 8. No matter how early the transplanted vines were severed from the root of Germany, they sprout a foliage of guilt. Some of Hegi's subjects had relatives who were captured by the Russians, men who ate poison ivy to kill their hunger. Some had fathers in the SS. Anneliese did -- and in her quiet way, she's proud. "I mean, they didn't take any old farm boy," she tells Hegi, continuing, "my mother says he never did anything bad." When Heinrich was little, the Nazis drafted his dog. "My parents got an official notification that he died with honors. I hate to think what that dog was being used for." Beate, born in 1942, asked her mother how she dealt with so many Jews being killed. "She just ignored it," the frustrated daughter comments, adding that "she must have known something" -- at the community showers, Mama was terrified that what came out of the spigots wouldn't be water. Some of Hegi's subjects never knew their parents at all. Of the tolerant couple who adopted him, Jurgen marvels that they never complained about his difficulty adjusting, even when he took to bicycling around their little Wisconsin town wearing a German army helmet -- a real one. His story, and others like it, may not fully answer the question of what people knew and what they could have done. But it does add some lines to our incomplete diagram of the mechanics of this century, and that's something to be grateful for. June 30, 1997 Sally Eckhoff lives in upstate New York. She writes for the Village Voice and many other publications. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html