Lebensraum! Book 1: A Passion for Land and Peace [Paperback]

Ingrid Rimland (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Samisdat Publishers, Ltd.; 1 edition (March 1, 1998)
• ISBN-10: 1896006019
• ISBN-13: 978-1896006017
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,404,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars German-Americans finally receive literary recognition, November 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Lebensraum! Book 1: A Passion for Land and Peace (Paperback)

Ingrid Rimland's powerful tale of Mennonites in Russia and the United States is a long overdue contribution to the saga of the German experience. Though some, such as the reviewer below, find her characters two-dimensional and the plot boring, this is undoubtedly the result of decades of anti-German propaganda from Hollywood. It's really too bad for those who have come to expect a "Hogan's Heroes" portrayal of goose-stepping Nazis that Rimland has given us a heart-rending account of what pacificists had to endure at the hands of American redneck yahoos, Russo-Ukrainian anarchists and an assorted cast... The climax, occurring in Volume III as the Wehrmacht and the Bolsheviks struggle to the death for the fate of the world, is drawn from Rimland's own childhood memories of her family being forced to seek protection with the German soldiers. The Germans as saviors and heroes - now there's a thought worth pursuing! After decades of melodramatic miniseries featuring Hollywood's favorite tribe, Ingrid Rimland's story of German industriousness and honor is a breath of fresh air.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Perspective, March 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Lebensraum! Book 1: A Passion for Land and Peace (Paperback)

Highly readable and engrossing. While some of the anti-semitic undertones are bothersome (as a German-American whose parents were children in NAZI Germany I am particularly sensitve to this), Dr. Rimland tells a compelling story how ordinary German peasants cope with the political changes in Imperial Prussia & Russia - through the Stalinist USSR and NAZI Germany, and the families' relations with American relatives who emigrated to the US in the 1870's and how eventually they come to war with each other. Dr. Rimland approaches this as a tragedy in that its the world geo-political situation that forces relative to fight relative. The brutality of the war in the east as experienced by a young German girl is particularly heart-wrenching -- and again hit home because of my own mother's experiences at the hands of the Soviet army in East Prussia. The fact that the book doesn't portray ordinary Germans as mindless millitaristic beasts, and dares to tell the story of their tragedy no doubt makes many WWII traditionalists uncomfortable. Somehow all we ever see in the US is film of American solidiers being welcomed by German children, who get candy, gum and cigarettes. The books dare to show the reality of rape and brutalization by the Soviet soldiers - and the ordinary peasant person's general ignorance of the political situation (they only saw Hitler as a savior from the terrors of Stalinist communism ----> a real terror to these people). As I said, the anti-semitic undertones are bothersome at times - but this was the reality of how the charaters thought. You couldn't write a historical novel about a Southern slaveholding family and not include their racism. The difference here is that Dr. Rimland moves beyond one-dimmensionalism and finds the sympathetic aspects of the characters as well --- and that undoubtedly leaves discomfort.

I thank Dr. Rimland for providing a persective of the other side which is often ignored - a picture of how German families coped on both sides of the Atlantic and that they were people -- not obscene caricatures.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvellous History of the Mennonite People, March 13, 2011

By 

Capt I. McRae "The Ancient Mariner" (Angus, Scotland.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lebensraum! Book 1: A Passion for Land and Peace (Paperback)

I had heard mixed reports of "Lebensraum", some saying it was an anti-semitic diatribe, others being more generous and saying it was a masterpiece. For me it was neither of these. I found it an really interesting history of the Mennonite people in America and their roots in Europe, which contains some alternative views on the Second World War in Eastern Europe.

I had often heard of the Mennonites, religious people who were, and still are in some areas, the backbone of American agriculture. I did not know the history of these people and how they were shuttled from pillar to post in their search for "lebensaum", or land to live in. Originating in Germany, they moved to the Ukraine and were welcomed by the Tsars who used them to open up land that had not been previously farmed. When the Soviet revolution came these same people were persecuted, and many left for America, but others stayed in Ukraine. This book is essentially the history of both groups up to the present day.

Ingrid Rimland was a child during World War 2, born in the Ukraine to Mennonite farming parents who had been persecuted by the Soviets for their pacifist beliefs. What she writes is a novel based on family memory, which gives it an authenticity which could not be achieved by even the best of researchers. I found the book in places emotional, sometimes funny and towards the end quite harrowing. It never, however, failed to keep me gripped and I found all three volumes truly hard to put down. One gets caught up in the people written about, they are so well depicted and their individual characters are just so real they have to be based on real people.

It is a truism that only the victors write the histories of wars, so inevitably these histories can be rather one sided. Ingrid Rimland gives an alternative view to the usual depiction of WWII German soldiers as looting, raping monsters. Indeed the Ukrainian people saw them as liberators from the slavery of the Soviet Union. This comes out graphically in volume three, hence some commentators have trashed "Lebensraum" as it does not follow the usual path in depicting WWII. As the author and her family were, however, victims of Soviet persecution and saw the Germans as liberators, one has to take cognisance of the authenticity of her story.

I personally enjoyed these books immensely, and would highly recommend them to the open minded ..... or even those of closed mind if they are prepared to concede that people can indeed see the same events through different eyes and come to different conclusions.