Thomas Harding (1) (1968–)
Author of Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz
For other authors named Thomas Harding, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Thomas Harding is a former documentary filmmaker and journalist who has written for the Financial Times and The Guardian, among other publications. He founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West Virginia. He lives in show more Hampshire, England. show less
Image credit: wikimediacommons/poetsstone
Works by Thomas Harding
Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz (2013) 388 copies
The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History (2015) 338 copies
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Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1968
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- London, England, UK
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Statistics
- Works
- 8
- Members
- 906
- Popularity
- #28,311
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 47
- ISBNs
- 99
- Languages
- 10
- Favorited
- 1
Harding went to Berlin in 2013 to look for the now-abandoned house his relatives had talked about, and to research its history by talking to residents of Groß Glienicke, an exercise which culminated in a project to turn the house into a protected monument and eventually a museum of local history.
Harding uses a mixture of oral history and documents to chronicle the history of the house and the village from the 1890s, before the local landowner sold off portions of his estate for housing, right through to the campaign to restore the house. This is all quite engaging, particularly because Harding treats all the people who have lived in the house with equal respect and focuses on their experience of living there rather than allowing himself to be tempted into recriminations about strangers living in the house his family built for themselves. We get a lively — albeit somewhat arbitrary — slice of German social history through time, with quite a lot of interesting details.
The book is a little less successful when Harding is trying to fill us in on the bigger picture of German history to give a context to the events: inevitably, he has to condense and simplify, and he often ends up with a story that is lacking in nuance and precision. A lot of relevant information is banished to the (ridiculously long) endnotes, and Penguin make things worse by not allowing him to put references to the notes in the text: you have to guess which passages might have notes attached to them and which don’t.
Not bad on the whole, but I think there are much more interesting books about German history written by actual Germans (OK, Australians too…).… (more)