Jürgen Schreiber Ein Maler aus Deutschland. Gerhard Richter. Das Drama einer Familie (An Artist from Germany: Gerhard Richter – A Family Drama) Pendo Verlag, 304 pp. pp. ISBN 3-86612-508-3 This excellent and startling study of Gerhard Richter (‘The Picasso of the Twentieth Century’, as the Guardian newspaper has called him) focuses on the great painter’s earlier years. During the 1960s he portrayed, among others, his aunt Marianne Schönfelder and his first father-in-law, Professor Dr Heinrich Eufinger. Amazingly, he did not know that the one had been a victim and the other a leading adherent of the Nazi regime. Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. He never knew his aunt. For him she remained the distant yet beautiful figure who inspired him from the family pictures. He was unaware that in September 1937, at the age of nineteen, she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and subsequently hospitalised. By that time the Nazis’ restrictive measures against the mentally ill were in full swing. A physician who was not even specialised in psychiatry dispatched her to a mental asylum. In 1938 she was ordered to be sterilised. In February 1945, after the bombing of Dresden, she died in the gas chambers. The man who headed the gynaecological hospital in Dresden-Friedrichstadt where Richter’s aunt’s operation took place was none other than Heinrich Eufinger, a Nazi from the start, who was later found to have ordered close to a thousand sterilisations. After the war this former SS Obersturmbannführer enjoyed a respected career as chief physician, first in East and later in West Germany. It was in the 1950s that Gerhard Richter returned to Dresden to take up a place at the renowned Art Academy, and when he fell in love with Eufinger’s daughter and was invited to live in the physician’s elegant house, spared by Allied bombs, his happiness seemed complete. The skeletons in the cupboard lay long unearthed, the remarkable entanglement of individual stories, and Jürgen Schreiber’s research led him to crumbling files, long neglected. As for Dresden itself, it was not all innocent baroque beauty – as Schreiber is at pains to point out. It was, on the contrary, one of Hitler’s favourite haunts and had the highest number of Nazi members per capita of all German cities. This book shows how Richter’s artistic perceptions were shaped by the war and how history affects lives. Authoritative and extremely readable, it could be translated in time for the artist’s seventy-fifth birthday in 2007.