PositiveThe Financial Times... not just the story of a life — it’s about the relationship between a woman and her grandmother, one in which O’Donnell gradually chips away at the wall of silence Inge has erected ... It is a moving story, sensitively told. Inge’s experiences as a young woman in Nazi-era Berlin, where she and her friends danced to jazz and swing in illicit nightclubs, are narrated with verve. The hunger and exploitation she endured post-1945 show that the years of reconstruction were, for many Germans, far tougher than the privations of the war ... One weakness is O’Donnell’s over-reliance on the testimony of her grandmother: it is essentially a single-source story, bolstered by a little archival research and references to standard secondary accounts. The problem with this is clear in her description of a crucial postwar reunion between Inge and the love of her life, Wolfgang: with no detail to go on, she \'imagines\' the encounter, in a way that feels unconvincing ... Still, Inge’s War is a worthy addition to the growing canon of literature by and about the Vertriebene.
Benjamin Balint
RaveFinancial Times\"... a highly entertaining story of literary friendship, epic legal battles and cultural politics centred on one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century ... Balint does a good job of weighing up the competing claims, and is careful not to get bogged down in legal details. What we get is an exquisitely human drama peopled with an eccentric cast of characters that beautifully evokes the early days of Israel, the sadness of the exiles, and the long shadow cast by the Holocaust — a tragedy that claimed the lives of Kafka’s three sisters. But his book is at its best in its portrait of Kafka as a man...\
