A Tablecloth for Hitler
A rich family history of resistance and collaboration
Growing up in a German-Dutch family, historian Bas von Benda-Beckmann developed a particular interest in the Second World War. His grandmother’s sister had been married to Hitler’s most trusted general Alfred Jodl, who was hanged for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. Another sister, meanwhile, had turned away from Nazism when she fell in love with a half-Jewish doctor, and personally knew those involved in Hitler’s failed assassination attempt in 1944.
.jpg)
At the centre of his family history was a mythical embroidered tablecloth, supposedly once gifted to Hitler for personally disqualifying a Jewish member of the Von Benda family tree, and apparently gifted in turn by the Fuhrer to General Franco on a state visit. In A Tablecloth for Hitler, Von Benda-Beckmann delves into the truth behind this story and the Nazi past of his grandparents and their siblings.
In charting his family’s changing fortunes – from wealthy friends of Kaizer Wilhelm II before WW1, to landed gentry fallen on hard times amid political unrest, to Nazi party members and WW2’s aftermath – he depicts his family’s political shift from liberal conservative, to conservative socialist, to national socialist.
The Von Bendas’ various functions throughout the Third Reich, and the extensive archival material they left behind, allow him to intimately reconstruct individual lives caught in the turbulent movements of History. In the end, Von Benda-Beckmann can find no evidence of there ever having been a tablecloth. Along the way, he does raise questions about family, mythology, morality and responsibility.
A Holocaust researcher examines his own family’s Nazi past
The author is from a German-Dutch family, with aristocratic roots in Germany
On the role of myth within families
A story of individual lives caught up in the turbulent movements of History
Year of publication
2023
Page count
672
Rights
Martijn Prins
m.prins@singeluitgeverijen.nl
Sample translation available
“Never does his compassion lapse into a blindness to his ancestors’ responsibility. Never do the historian and the man writing about his family get in each other's way. Add to that Bas von Benda-Beckmann’s elegantly understated pen, and you have a fascinating book.”
“Bas von Benda-Beckmann’s family history reads like a something out of film.”
Bas von Benda-Beckmann
After The Annex
When Anne Frank’s father, Otto, returned to Amsterdam from Auschwitz, he sought to uncover what had happened to his wife and two daughters, the Van Pels family and dentist Fritz Pfeffer – the seven companions with whom he had spent two years in hiding before their arrest by the Gestapo. He awaited their return at the train station each day, photographs of them in hand. Tragically, after piecing together the stories of the few eyewitnesses he found, he would be forced to conclude that he alone had survived the Nazi death camps. Seventy-five years later, 'After the Annex' takes up Otto Frank’s project and carefully reconstructs each of their camp experiences in the final days of the Holocaust.
Joke J. Hermsen
Under a Different Sky
From a young age, philosopher and writer Joke H. Hermsen has wrestled with the longing to be elsewhere – a kind of ‘farsickness’, from the German 'fernweh', which has gone paired with never quite feeling at home. When, during the pandemic, the feeling rises to a crescendo in her own house, she packs her bags. But everywhere she goes – from France to the Netherlands to Germany – memories wash over her.
Marcel Haenen
Penguins and People
A labour of love from journalist Marcel Haenen, 'Penguins and People' takes the reader on a gripping expedition into the very fabric of the penguin’s existence. He examines our relationship with the bird, from early encounters with navigators to captive penguins as crowd-pullers at zoos, from silver screen stardom ('Happy Feet', 'March of the Penguins') to penguin tourism and its current protected status.
Marc Hijink
Focus — The ASML Way
For decades the most valuable company in Europe operated in the shadows. The chips manufactured by its machines, power our smartphones and AI assistants, make our coffee and drive our cars and even guide cruise missiles. In fact, roughly 90% of all chips worldwide are made by ASML. In recent years however, the Dutch manufacturing company has found itself in the spotlight, at the centre of a geopolitical storm between the United States, China and Europe.
