Traces of My Father

the long version

"When in 1979 Sigfrid Gauch published the groundbreaking Vaterspuren (Traces of My Father), the first of the so-called father books about father-son conflicts and the Nazi legacy, a new genre in German literature was born. This autobiographal novel - translated into English for the first time - is Gauch's attempt to come to terms with his father, Herman Gauch, a physician who joined the National Socialists in the 1920s, wrote six books of "race research," and to his dying day remained an unrepentant Nazi. Unlike many of the father books, Traces of My Father is less a political attack than a personal journey. Gauch's narrator separates his father's abhorrent politics from his character, providing an affecting portrait of the struggle to reconcile the past."--Jacket.