Keen On

The New York City based writer John Ganz appeared on episode 2099 talking about how American cracked up in the Nineties with the rise of neo-Nazis like David Duke. When it comes to national crack-ups, however, nothing much competes with Nazi Germany in the Thirties - and Ganz, as a grandson of German Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently travelled to Cologne to search for his family’s bookstore. This trip, which Ganz describes in a Harper’s piece, The Dead Admonish, is anything but cathartic. In contrast with other descendants of Jews returning to Germany like the British journalist John Kampfner, Ganz finds little reassuring about contemporary Germany. Strangely, the trip seems to have ignited a sense of Jewishness in the defiantly secular Ganz. The dead do, indeed, admonish. John Ganz is the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, which was published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Michael Lipkin assisted with translating source mater