cover image Mixed Blessings: An Almost Ordinary Life in Hitler's Germany

Mixed Blessings: An Almost Ordinary Life in Hitler's Germany

Heinz R. Kuehn. University of Georgia Press, $19.95 (206pp) ISBN 978-0-8203-1046-6

``One man's experience of a cataclysmic period in mankind's history'' unfolds in this affecting autobiographical recollection of growing up in the Hitler era. Raised in a Catholic/Jewish household that was torn by his parents' failing marriage, Kuehn was 14 years old when the Nazis assumed power in Germany. In subsequent years he participated in compulsory labor and military service, but found physical as well as spiritual refuge in the Benedictine priory to which his reclusive father became attached. Love of books, immersion in scholastic philosophy and, eventually, a cherished marriage, provided islands of serenity and solitude during the Allied strafing of Berlin. Kuehn, who emigrated to the U. S. in 1951, evokes the perils of his youthful experience as a wanderer between two incompatible worlds shattered by the force of the Holocaust. (Jan.)