Image for Investigation

Image for Investigation: About my Father is Christoph Meckel’s celebrated work of memoir or "father-biography" in the mould of Paul Kersten’s Der alltägliche Tod meines Vaters and Ruth Rehmann’s Der Mann auf der Kanzel. The book is an act of need, personal and political: an attempt, by the son of a former German officer in the Second World War, to account not merely for his father’s actions but for the actions of a generation. His compassion, his dexterity with the knife, his lack of sentiment when sentiment would only slow his hand, his seeing around his subject, his willingness (an artist’s) to explore—these traits make Image an uncommon work of its kind. Meckel’s language is unsparing, torn from a heart shut tight and wounded by love. This edition revises Stan Jones’s original translation, and includes a new introduction by Ben Winch. "Ironically, the portrait which is more believable is not that of E. Meckel but of the author himself, who inadvertantly appears in the role of a judgemental, petulant and vindictive son, out to even with his father for the many unjust punishments he had suffered at the latter’s hands." — Anest Andrea, World Literature Today "A chapter of family history, which is not unique and not purely private but representative and political through-and through. . . . A sensitive officer, who would rather have sat at his writer’s desk and yet enjoyed command; a father, who would rather have been the dad-at-play and yet claims the position of head of the family in all circumstances and sees correction as his duty: the images fit together exactly." — Elsbeth Pulve, Schweizerische Monatshefte