Matthew Reisz

The history of Nazism in small objects

A cookbook, a knife with a swastika, a diary in Sütterlin script and the Berlin Philharmonic’s instruments all contain pitiful stories

Alice Urbach, c. 1949, with her son Otto, the father of Karina Urbach. [Courtesy of Karina Urbach]
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  • Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook

    Karina Urbach, translated by Jamie Bulloch

    MacLehose/Quercus, pp. 416, £20

  • My Grandfather’s Knife and Other Stories of War and Belonging

    Joseph Pearson

    History Press, pp. 320, £20

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that we had two cookbooks on our shelf at home with the same title’ – a 1938 edition by her grandmother Alice and one from the following year attributed to Rudolf Rösch.

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