The Winter Garden
Non-FictionPrint
Original title
De wintertuin
Author
Jan Konst
Konst has written a fascinating book about a German family and how it held its ground across four generations in the turbulent twentieth century. It portrays people trying to lead a more or less normal life in times of political turmoil.
NRC Handelsblad
'The Winter Garden' is not only an impressive history of a very ordinary family in wartime, but also an investigation into how to best talk about the “ordinary” Germans who caused untold suffering and were severely punished for it. Konst’s solution: don’t try to hide your own ambivalent feelings. Be frank as a writer. And it works.
Trouw
Jan Konst
Jan Konst (b. 1963) is a literary scholar specialised in Dutch literature and works at the Freie Universität of Berlin, where he holds the Chair of Dutch Philology: Literary Studies. His publications discuss early modern literature, Dutch-German literary relations and contemporary literature in the Netherlands and Flanders.