Sanderling

This moving biography of Florens Christian Rang (1864-1924), unpicks the lasting impact of this principled man who was a Protestant pastor near Poznan in modern-day Poland, then part of Prussia. He subsequently abandoned the church and became a friend and contemporary of several great early-twentieth-century thinkers, including Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin, with whom he hoped to create a movement devoted to world peace. The great barrier to Weber’s understanding of her ancestor is German history since his death, summed up in a single word alluded to but not spoken until the very last pages: Auschwitz. Did Rang help to lay the ground for the Holocaust through his part in ‘Germanizing’ Poland? Or can his friendships with Jews be seen as a counter to those Germans who went along with the Nazis? Significantly, Rang’s son – Anne Weber’s grandfather – was an opportunist during the Third Reich. Weber places the story of a grandfather she never met, because he refused to acknowledge his son’s illegitimate daughter, alongside that of his father to create a travel diary through time, reaching back to encounter her ancestors.