Sibylle Lewitscharoff Montgomery (The Film Maker) Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH, February 2003. 352 pp. ISBN 3-421-05680-3 Can the children of de-Nazified Nazis make films about Jews, is one of the key questions asked in this enigmatic but highly readable novel, which describes the making of a film about Jew Süss, himself of course the subject of a notorious piece of Nazi propaganda. Montgomery, the film maker, is presented as a man who has escaped from Germany and its post war moral problems to reinvent himself in Rome: famous, rich, fastidious, a manipulator of images. Yet his fame and obsession with images turn out to be based on genuine creative genius and discipline, as well as on real moral concern with what lies in and around appearances in present-day Rome as in post war Germany. Has he, in fact, or had his family, a guilty past? An omniscient narrator bobs up from time to time, implying dark secrets, only to be contradicted by Montgomery's mother. Either way, Montgomery's abandonment of family tradition may itself be a sort of deception. His success in Rome depends on his inherited traits; he is like his father and uncle, not unlike them, and his wealth, like theirs, is linked to generosity, competence and business awareness. His obsession with Süss stems from similar ambivalence towards tradition, culture and religion, so that he plays the character convincingly himself when an actor drops out. Like his hero he is admirably tenacious in forming his own identity when others seek to fragment and destroy it, and equally so in pursuing large complex issues through what appears to be a medium of falsity and disguise (especially the film sets and film costumes). In this book, not everything is as it seems, and we are constantly forced to revise our image of who and what is important or immaterial, ridiculous or estimable, astute or misconceived. Sibylle Lewitscharoff has written a compelling novel, half detective story, half philosophical enquiry, that keeps the reader guessing to the last.