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Title details for The Collaborators by Ian Buruma - Wait list

The Collaborators

Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II

by Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma
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Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who may have been con artists and collaborators under Japanese and German rule, or true heroes, or something in between.
On the face of it, the three characters in this book seem to have little in common—aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point. Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur—Himmler calling him his “magic Buddha.” Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender-fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a con artist, he was regarded regarded by supporters as the “Dutch Dreyfus.”
All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat story of angels and devils. The Collaborators is a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these incredible figures and what will always remain out of reach. What emerges is all the more mesmerizing for being painted in chiaroscuro. In times of life-and-death stakes, the truth quickly gets buried under lies and self-deception. Now, when demagogues abroad and at home are assaulting the truth once more, the stories of the collaborators and their lessons are indispensable.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 7, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593671153
      • File size: 307751 KB
      • Duration: 10:41:08

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 23, 2023
      In this illuminating and variegated group biography, Buruma (The Churchill Complex) reconsiders three notorious WWII figures: Felix Kersten, the “plump bon vivant” who became S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler’s masseur and confidant; Friedrich Weinreb, a Hasidic Jew who betrayed some of the Dutch Jews who paid him to save them from deportation to the concentration camps; and Kawashima Yoshiko, a “cross-dressing Manchu princess who spied for the Japanese secret police in China.” Writing that all three “reinvented themselves in a time of war, persecution, and mass murder, where moral choices often had fatal consequences but were rarely as straightforward as we were told to believe after the dangers had lifted,” Buruma documents how his protagonists downplayed German and Japanese atrocities and self-mythologized their own acts of resistance and courage. Kersten, for example, falsely claimed credit for dissuading Himmler from deporting the entire Dutch population to eastern Europe, while Yoshiko helped spread propaganda casting the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo as a peaceful and modern “Asian utopia.” Buruma sifts through his subjects’ complex, multinational backgrounds in fluid prose and brings a welcome measure of sympathy to their lives without minimizing the repercussions of their actions. It’s a captivating portrait of what happens when survival turns into self-deception. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

    • Library Journal

      June 10, 2024

      Dutch-born Buruma (The Churchill Complex) narrates his intriguing group biography of three unrelated con artists who collaborated with their Axis enemy during World War II. Known in Japan as the "Manchurian Mata Hari," Kawashima Yoshiko was the gender-fluid daughter of a Manchurian prince who gave her to a Japanese friend to raise; she spied on China for the Japanese during the War of Resistance. Felix Kersten, a Finnish masseur and confidant of Heinrich Himmler, made overblown claims after the war that he had saved the entire Dutch population from being deported by the Nazis. Hasidic Jew Frederich Weinreb invented a scheme to receive money from Jewish people hoping to avoid deportation from the Netherlands; he betrayed them by turning them in to the German secret police, the Gestapo. Despite the captivating content, Buruma's unvarying, lecturelike tone while chronicling these three unconnected lives makes this mashup difficult to follow. The book is divided into themed chapters with each person assigned a number. While section numbers are briefly announced in the audio, there are no vocal clues to signal when the subject has changed, and this results in an occasionally disorienting listen. VERDICT Fascinating information that loses each subject's life thread in this choppy treatment.--Stephanie Bange

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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