At first glance, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who is among Germany's most well-known cultural critics, chose a fabulous subject for this historical study, which is not a novel, but also not a “thorough source-based analysis” (p. 357). Born in 1878 and attached since 1915 to the General Staff, Kurt von Hammerstein served as chief of staff in the Reichswehr Ministry from 1930 and 1934, and worked closely with Kurt von Schleicher before and during his term as the Weimar Republic's last chancellor in the effort to “tame” and resist the Nazis just as Kurt and Kurt, as Wilhelm Groener's lieutenants, had tried to tame the Social Democrats in 1919. He approached President Hindenburg with dire political warnings just before Hitler's appointment as chancellor in late January 1933 only to host the new chancellor in the Ministry's Bendlerblock offices where Hitler outlined to the general staff his plans for political revolution at home and imperial conquest abroad a few days later, on February 3. And Hammerstein generally confounded contemporaries with his independent-minded children—two of his daughters became Communists even before 1933; a third emigrated to a kibbutz (Givat Brenner) in Palestine before leaving for Japan in the late 1930s; two sons found themselves on the outer skirts of the German resistance and were forced to go into hiding after July 20, 1944; and Hammerstein's youngest son, Franz, remains active in the civic and political life of Berlin to this day. Enzensberger follows up the incredible connections spun out by this extraordinary family drama. Hammerstein himself married well, though he fell out with his deeply reactionary father-in-law, Walther von Lüttwitz, who unsuccessfully putsched against the Weimar Republic in the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup in March 1920, only to sneer at Hammerstein for being a sheer “opportunist” in the new republican era (p. 21). Yet the atmosphere of 1920s Berlin was intellectually voracious, and it provided Hammerstein's oldest daughter, Marie Luise, the opportunity to meet and fall in love with Werner Scholem, Reichstag deputy for the Communist Party of Germany and the brother of the philosopher Gershom Scholem who had long before left for Palestine. Werner Scholem was executed by the Nazis in Buchenwald in 1940; Marie Luise went on to a career as a lawyer in the German Democratic Republic. At the same time, her sister Helga had a common-law marriage with Leo Roth, a Communist agent much appreciated in the underground by Herbert Wehner, who after the war emerged as a prominent Social Democratic politician; Roth was purged and murdered in his Moscow exile in 1938. In the late 1930s, Hammerstein entertained Carl Goerdeler, Martin Niemöller, and Ludwig Beck in his modest Dahlem villa. If Schleicher was dubiously regarded as the “spider” by Berlin politicians in the last years of the Weimar Republic, it was Hammerstein's family that actually spun the spider's web.

Hammerstein's family has all the trimmings of a compelling historical study. Indeed, Enzensberger subtitles his book “a German story,” and later comments on it as a “very German story” (p. 100). As a “very German story,” it is implicitly exemplary—exemplary of what Enzensberger somewhat romantically regards as the nobility of spirit that many representatives of Germany's aristocracy still cultivated in 1933: clarity of vision, tolerance but also moral laziness, and a geniality that forsook resolve and action. This nourished a milieu in which basic political differences could be expressed, though only in a “Casinoton” (p. 205), and it enabled political and military cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union, a symptom like, Enzensberger adds, the “axis Paris-Berlin-Moscow” in opposition to the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq (p. 232), of Germany's enduring two-hundred-year-old ambition to mediate between east and west. But Hammerstein's was also a single German's story about the idiosyncratic (der Eigensinn), an atypical individual who opposed Hitler, who may have warned Hindenburg against Hitler's appointment in January 1933, and who was forced out of office a year later. Not a single Hammerstein supported the Nazis, notes Enzensberger; “not too many German families can say that about themselves” (p. 275). The Hammersteins indicate that there were routes to survive the dictatorship without capitulating. For Enzensberger, they represent what might have been: undoubtedly a German, but certainly not a very German story.

Enzensberger invests considerable energy in bringing the account of the Hammersteins to light. With the invaluable aid of historian Reinhard Müller, Enzensberger laid his hands on a particularly detailed protocol of Hitler's meeting with the generals deposited in Moscow and dated just three days after the February 3, 1933, event. This leads Enzensberger to guess that Hammerstein's daughter Helga discovered and secretly photocopied the document and even to speculate whether Hammerstein himself, given his contacts in Moscow, passed it on. Access to archives in the Soviet Union also let Enzensberger follow the traces of Leo Roth, Herbert Wehner, and other exiled German Communists who crossed paths with the Hammerstein daughters. Back and forth, like a spider across its web, Enzensberger attempts to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. What did Hammerstein say to Hindenburg? What did he know about his daughters? What were Hammerstein's political motivations? What political roles did Helga and Marie Luise actually play? Enzensberger introduces his various subjects, steps back to paint historical background (often tendentiously), and even concocts imaginary interviews with the dead. This sort of play is the reason that Enzensberger insists that his is neither a work of history nor a novel, but something in between.

Although well intentioned, in the end, Enzensberger's imaginative attempts to understand the Hammersteins fails. It does so for two reasons. First, Enzensberger refrains from interpretation and judgment. With his documentary reportage, he wants to show, but not tell. This reluctance is more self-indulgent than tactful; there is very little attempt to analyze the military circles through which Hammerstein passed or to assess thoroughly Hammerstein's political values or opinions either in 1918 at the dawn of the republican era or in 1933 with the achievement of the “national revolution.” And while Enzensberger dramatizes Hammerstein's alleged warning against Hitler's appointment, he ignores both Hammerstein's own 1935 account in which the general claimed that he urged Hindenburg not to appoint Papen without Hitler and the political aim of “taming” Hitler and integrating his movement into the state, which Hammerstein and Schleicher pursued to the point of wrecking the Social Democratic government in Prussia, one of Weimar Germany's remaining democratic foundations, in the “Papen coup” of July 20, 1932, on the grounds of national security. In other words, to get Hammerstein posthumously included in 1944's July 20th, Enzensberger must discount his role in 1932's.

The second, more fundamental reason for the failure of Enzensberger's study is that the protagonists themselves disappoint. They do not speak up: Kurt von Hammerstein himself said little in the company of his family; his daughters never discussed their political involvement, even long after the events; and other family members turned reclusive or fell silent in old age. The family archive reveals astonishingly little in the way of self-reflection. As a result, the byways of the Hammersteins cannot suggest an alternative civic sphere as Enzensberger argues. Kurt von Hammerstein's own assessment of the political situation in Nazi Germany, which was to let the feeble-minded majority complete the disastrous course they had charted lest they make excuses for being stopped along the way, as had been the case in 1918 with the “Stab-in-the-Back Legend,” was less prescient than self-serving, a justification for Hammerstein's own inaction and indifference. He and his children resemble Zelig-like figures, ciphers, in this case, for Enzensberger's own romance with a German history that never was. At second glance, this “German story” fades away despite Enzensberger's pyrotechnics.