Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself
By Florian Huber
Allen Lane, 304pp, £20/$24
This is an inauspicious title for a thought-provoking book. Its subtitle, The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945, provides the clue to its meaning. Huber, who was born in Nuremberg in 1967, says he was inspired to write it after reading Ian Kershaw’s history of the death throes of the Third Reich, The End.
For readers today the book provides a salutary reminder that disobeying the divine injunction “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” brings its own retribution. Behind Huber’s examination of the mass suicide epidemic in Demmin, a small provincial town two hours north of Berlin, lies his psychological analysis of the despair many Germans throughout the country felt at the end of the War – especially in the east, about to be invaded by the Russians.
