#RivetingReviews: John Munch reviews SANDERLING by Anne Weber, translated by Neil Blackadder

The conundrum is a perennial one: How could Germany, the nation that produced Goethe and Beethoven, also pave the way to the immemorial abomination of Hitler and the Holocaust? Anne Weber’s approach in her latest book, Sanderling, is far too nuanced and finely wrought for her to phrase the question in such blunt newspaper headline terms. But it is nevertheless one of the intractable issues that lie at the core of this short, mortifying memoir.

She describes it as a “journal of a trip of exploration”. Along the way Weber, born in Germany but by her own choice a French resident for the second half of her life, compiles a fleeting outline of the lives of several generations of her male relatives. Her aim: to seek explanations and, perhaps also, some sort of communal expiation long after an era of unprecedented turbulence.

Weber’s researches revolve in part around lives and events that unfolded decades before the Hitlerian nightmare. Her foundational focus is on the relative nicknamed in the book’s title. The Sanderling is a plump, inoffensive wading bird commonly found on the seashores of France where Weber made her home half a lifetime ago.

She applies this nom de plume to her great-grandfather, Florian Christian Rang, because the bird’s behaviour mirrors his sometimes agitated probing of the political currents of his time. Weber lists other less flattering descriptors of Rang – maniac, radical, malcontent, rebel – that could have been used instead about her relative. She is clearly anxious neither to condemn him outright nor to sugarcoat his name.

Sanderling/Rang died a decade before the Nazi takeover of Germany. He personally could have had little – if any – direct effect on the events of the 1930s in Germany. But his inbuilt Teutonic sense of obedience and “Ordnung” if repeated on a wider national scale could offer clues to the eruption of the storm centre that was later to convulse Europe and much of the world.

From the outset Weber is acutely aware of the sizeable challenge she faces to uncover the essence of Sanderling’s life. We’re two walkers on different stretches of the same route who never encounter each other, she writes.

Sanderling emerges from the excavation of the substantial available archive as a scholarly member of the Prusso-German bourgeoisie steeped in both the law and the priesthood. He started his career in public administration before moving from a first post in Halberstadt in Saxony to the Polish city of Poznań where he fulfilled the archetypal role (in Germany) of public official.

His posting to Poland was devoted to the quasi-colonial goal of “Germanising” the resident Catholic population. It was a job that at the time was on a par with the status enjoyed by the priesthood. It was also an occupation filled by several members of the family over the generations. Weber herself notes that she is the only one of the line not to have been a civil servant. In mid-career Sanderling returned to university to study Protestant theology.

Even though her journey leads her through a vast quantity of papers, places and encounters Weber concludes that there is a secret surrounding Sanderling’s personality which was closed off forever on his death.

What does remain is a clear signposting of his final years which were spent as a valued member of an Austro-German circle of internationally revered intellectuals. Most pre-eminent was Walter Benjamin, almost 30 years Sanderling’s junior, who, remarkably, pronounced him the “deepest critic of Germanness since Nietzsche”. Rang also facilitated Benjamin’s relationship with the novelist, librettist and poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a commanding figure among the early 20th century European intelligentsia and a close confidant.

All the more reason why his warm interchange with liberal Jewish thinkers should be reason for Weber to regret that one of his sons should end up as a committed Nazi. The German conundrum remains.

Reviewed by John Munch

SANDERLING

Written by Anne Weber

Translated by Neil Blackadder

Published by Indigo Press (2025)

December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

John Munch started his career as a reporter and editor on the Cambridge News. He then worked for the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, the Guardian and the London Evening Standard. In the 1970s, he reported for the Toronto Star, before spending twenty-five years on the Financial Times.

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