Like a Tear in the Ocean (Wie eine Traene im Ozean)

"I’ve chosen books that are very real to me. All five cover a 30-year-period that had a momentous impact on world history. They also deeply affected my mother’s family. Mine is therefore an intellectual and personal interest. These books represent the scope and drama of these events in a very poignant way. This period saw a brilliant piece of mankind destroyed. And my mother’s family was the perfect example of the kind of culture that disappeared. Her paternal family were the Wittgensteins of Vienna. They were a colourful and extremely talented cosmopolitan family; they represented the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie that’s obviously gone forever in that part of the world. Her maternal grandfather, Stefan Grossmann, was a Jewish intellectual who represented the same cultural milieu in a different, and less opulent, way. Everything I’ve done in relation to this 30-year period is an attempt, encouraged by my mother, to keep this culture alive and revisit what happened. He was an acquaintance of my mother. Along with Arthur Koestler, he was probably the best-known communist activist. Sperber broke from the Communist Party in 1937. The book is a fantastic description of the events from the early 1930s to the end of the Second World War. Its main protagonist, Dojno Faber, is a member of the Communist Party, for perfectly good idealistic reasons. Despite leaving the party, he tries to find a basis on which to continue his original work and improve the world. With the rise of the Nazis and the outbreak of war, he ends up in Yugoslavia, the one country in Eastern Europe that rejected Stalin and had a sort of independent existence. Somewhere between Communist dictatorship and total democracy. At the heart of the book are the conversations between Faber and Baron von Stetten, a cynical but clear-headed historian. From the start von Stetten tells Faber: “You’re wasting your time. It’s impossible to have a good revolution because the revolution will defeat you before you’ve succeeded. And when it does, it will destroy you and all your ideas.” There’s a wonderful core of intellectual discussion that gets to the essence of the problem: how can you combine a very worthy cause with the piece of machinery to implement it? The conclusion is: you can’t. Faber finds a sense of purpose by looking after a little boy he met while exploring destroyed Europe. If you want a sign of hope, that’s it. The most worthy, realistic way to do good is to focus on the people around you. If you try and focus on large numbers of people, you’ll invariably fail. It’s actually quite a hopeful description of one part of what happened. It’s also a piece of fiction and not political philosophy in the conventional sense. It’s a real piece of theatre – with thousands of actors. It’s very good. But it costs around £60 so it hasn’t been used much."