Small Mirror, Large Landscape

The cover promises a dark story: The Beckmann painting is quintessentially German Expressionist, a somber cityscape, a dark river with ice floes, a crescent moon, heavily outlined buildings. Iconically Weimar. It is both the armature and the background to this European memoir. But the memoir itself, is for the most part, a series of lightly told bits of a life narrative, a boulevardier version of a history of constant marginality and displacement recalled in a mix of straight narrative, letters and sections of script-like dialogue.

“Erich” is renamed “Otto” after his father dies when he was an infant (it takes some time to sort out that this is the narrator). He has been born into a prosperous Frankfurt Jewish family, proprietors of Koch’s court jewellers, purveyors of pearls, diamonds and tiaras to the aristocracy and the merely wealthy. The family are “Jewish” but hardly Jews (as Jonathan Miller put it years ago in Beyond the Fringe). “Art, the sister of...