Sanderling

The past lies before us as a foreign, distant land. Sanderling is a personal journey of exploration into the past, and the fascinating world of Florens Christian Rang (1864-1924), written by his great grand-daughter Anne Weber, one of Germany's leading contemporary authors.

Rang, whom Weber nicknames Sanderling after the darting shorebird, began as a Protestant pastor stationed near Poznan in modern-day Poland, then part of Prussia. The church, which he subsequently abandoned, had a mission to 'Germanise' the local population. Weber draws parallels between this apparently benign ambition and the subsequent murderous intent of the Third Reich.

After his apostasy Sanderling became friends with several great early-twentieth-century thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Martin Buber. It was during this time he joined a group of writers, artists and philosophers with whom he hoped to create a utopian society. Later on, his own son - Weber's grandfather - became a Nazi.

Anne Weber traces the contradictions and crises, the reckonings and departures of her great-grandfather by deciphering his letters and diaries, and travelling in his footsteps to Poland. Through the thicket of time and research, complex questions arise: how do you live with a history that you can't escape? What did it mean to be German one hundred years ago? And what is it like today?

With literary and philosophical references including Sontag, Sebald and Nietzsche, Weber combines her family history with a broader examination of ethics and morality to create a travel diary through time, reaching back to understand her ancestors.