Sanderling

by Anne Weber, Neil Blackadder (translator)

How do you live with a history you can’t escape? What did it mean to be German one hundred years ago? And what is it like today? These are the questions at the heart of Sanderling, a classic work of literary inquiry by Anne Weber, one of Germany’s leading contemporary authors.

Weber embarks on a personal journey into the past to uncover the life of her great-grandfather Florens Christian Rang (1864–1924), whom she nicknames Sanderling after the darting shorebird. A Protestant pastor in Prussian-ruled Poland, Rang served a church whose mission to “Germanise” the local population would later be echoed in the murderous ambitions of the Third Reich.

After leaving the church, Sanderling moved in the circles of Walter Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Martin Buber. He joined a group of writers, artists, and philosophers who dreamed of a utopian society, even as one of his sons, Weber’s grandfather, would go on to become a Nazi.

By deciphering his letters and diaries, and travelling in his footsteps to Poland, Weber traces the contradictions and crises, the reckonings and departures of a complex legacy. 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.

240 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication February 10, 2026

About the author

Anne Weber ist Schriftstellerin und Übersetzerin. Sie schreibt in deutscher wie auch in französischer Sprache. Ihre Werke wurden mit dem Heimito von Doderer-Literaturpreis, dem 3sat-Preis und dem Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis ausgezeichnet. 2020 wurde sie zur Stadtschreiberin von Bergen-Enkheim ernannt und erhielt den Deutschen Buchpreis. Sie lebt seit 1983 in Paris.

Reviews

[Matthew Ted]

He tells me he's slowly realising what it must mean to be German. It's a burden you come into the world with, I say. It's been there from the start and never goes away. But you don't hold all the members of a family responsible for one person's crime! he says. That's dreadful. You can't let them do that to you, he says, you have to resist. He defends me, would like to acquit me, because in his eyes I've been wrongly accused. I tell him the question isn't whether you yourself feel guilty, whether such a feeling is justified or not. The burden is there, like it or not. Regardless of how violently you reject it. You feel it already even as a child. And, since from the start I've been feeling uncomfortable about seeming to appeal for his pity, I add: It's not so bad, it never keeps me from sleeping at night. That may be true, but only adds to it; I'd almost prefer it if from time to time it had prevented me from getting to sleep, I think, though I don't tell him this because it would strike him as unbelievable and exaggerated. I think.
Instead, I tell him that all German people, always and forever, will in their own and everyone else's eyes be associated with that. Germans experience this more clearly than ever when they're abroad. Quietly, I bark into his ear: Achtung! Verboten! And: Ve haf vays off making you talk.
My travelling companion: Right, that can't be very funny.
Me: Well, it is funny, but over time . . .