Sanderling

by Anne Weber, Neil Blackadder (translator)

How do you live with a history you cannot escape? What did it mean to be German one hundred years ago―and what does it mean today?These questions lie at the heart of Sanderling, a classic work of literary inquiry by Anne Weber, one of Germany’s leading contemporary authors. In this deeply personal and intellectually rigorous book, Weber journeys 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 committed to the “Germanization” of the local population―an ideology that would later find horrific expression in the ambitions of the Third Reich. After leaving the church, Sanderling became part of the intellectual circles of Walter Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Martin Buber, joining writers, artists, and philosophers who dreamed of a utopian society. Yet his legacy is deeply one of his sons―Weber’s grandfather―would go on to become a Nazi.Through close readings of letters and diaries and by traveling in her ancestor’s footsteps across Poland, Weber traces a lineage marked by contradiction, moral crisis, reckoning, and rupture. Drawing on literary and philosophical touchstones such as Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and Friedrich Nietzsche, she weaves family history with a searching examination of ethics, responsibility, and memory.Both a travel diary through time and a meditation on inherited guilt and identity, Sanderling reaches back into the past to better understand the present―and the burdens it carries.“A searing examination of family and historical legacy, of how the past extends into the present.” ― The Observer

240 pages, Hardcover

Published 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 . . .