By Hugo Hamilton

The seat of the first, second, and cold wars in less than a hundred years, the city of Berlin could be said to enclose the heart of the twentieth century. In a similar manner, and with Berlin as its center, Hugo Hamilton’s Disguise encompasses the strange and exhilarating transformations of Germany through a confused and broken family.

The plot focuses largely on musician Gregor Leidmann, whose rejection of his Nazi-generation parents is at once powerful and misguided. But the reader also sees through Gregor’s mother and father during his imprisonment in a Soviet P.O.W. camp, and her fragile existence in bombed Berlin. Gregor’s grandfather, a veteran of bayonet trench-fighting from the first world war, is also given space in the novel, in addition to Gregor’s abandoned son. Looking at his grown son (now a vegetarian chef) and his dread-locked vegan girlfriend, Gregor reflects on the Berlin that this new generation inhabits:

The city is vivid with history. Layers of it in every suburb, coming up through the streets, in people’s eyes. A chamber of horrors, but also a place of monuments and devotion to memory. A place that has no time for greatness any more and celebrates instead the ordinary genius of survival. A wounded place at the heart of Europe, eager to heal and laugh.”

Though specifically describing 21st century Berlin, Gregor could well be explaining the entire world of the novel. Disguise is bursting and bubbling with history, convulsed with diverse people’s diverse inabilities to cope with the aftermath of different wars.

Much of the novel is concerned with Gregor’s discovery and embrace of his secret Jewish past, an identity is parents chose to forget when they replaced their dead three-year-old Gregor with an anonymous Jewish child. This tragic loss, and the deceptions which necessarily follow, seem to freeze Gregor’s parents into their war-time personae. His childhood home is a literal museum to death and survival thanks to his father’s copious hunting trophies, with his mother’s anxious self-hatred destroying any possibility of warmth and compassion. Their concealment of his true identity, and their subsequent denials, drive Gregor to flee into a strange new Europe hungry to forget it’s past and eager to embrace it’s newfound tolerance. Stopped by East German police officers while hitchhiking on the autobahn, Gregor and his friend Martin are marched down a ravine and ordered to remove their jackets.

‘You won’t get away with any more,’ Gregor said, ‘I’m Jewish.’It was like a grenade going off… Everything changed. It was clear that Martin and Gregor were no terrorists. This was just a routine piece of opportunism, two thug policemen deciding to humiliate two free-living hippy wasters. But now it was going wrong for them… the policemen backed off, out of that history lesson as fast as they could.”

‘Routine’ actions, throughout Disguise, are suddenly and inextricably transformed by the pained history that pours forth from the very land itself.

Yet the land seems to hold the promise of renewal as well. While the tortured history of the Liedmanns progresses throughout the novel, alternate chapters focus on a single day in the country, when Gregor is an old man and his son is grown and bitter. The entire extended family spends the day picking apples, reconnecting after a long, and somewhat self-imposed, separation from one another. This serene day? a day of reconciliation and comradery?balances the visceral discomfort and horror of the other chapters, gesturing towards a Germany that can somehow transcend the impossible transformations of their recent history.

It is fitting then that the novel ends at this country estate, with an impromptu musical procession of the entire extended Liedmann family under the summer sky. They are arranged from youngest to oldest, with the smallest child leading a column stretching back to the aged Gregor, playing his trombone? formed into that many-legged creature that is the heart of the Sphinx’s question to Oedipus. Gregor and his family, however, have far more hope than Oedipus’ cursed house. Immediately before the procession, Gregor realizes that, “History is the question we keep trying to answer… We are the answer to history, this corridor of correction, full of intuition and invention and handed-down instruction. Our identity is our instability…” Hamilton’s convoluted family offers hope, and perhaps the answer, to Germany’s evolving relationship with its past.

Reviewed by Ben Platt

Disguise by Hugo Hamilton
Harper, 2008
Cloth, 272 pp, $23.99
ISBN-10: 0060784687