IN BRIEF Ute Scheub Das falsche Leben. Eine Vatersuche (A False Life: In Search of My Father) Piper Verlag February 2006, 291 pp. ISBN 3-492-04839-0 On 19 July 1969, at the Church Congress in Stuttgart, Manfred Augst, Ute Scheub’s father, stood up during a reading by Gunter Grass, grabbed the hall microphone, made a confused speech attacking the Church and what he called the establishment, before concluding to boos from the audience: ‘And now, I’d like to salute my comrades from the SS’. He then put a small bottle to his mouth, swallowed the contents, and informed the woman standing next to him: ‘And that, young lady, was cyanide.’ In a book that couldn’t have been written before now, Scheub confronts her father’s past – a candid study of private guilt and a wider assessment of the German psyche from the Second World War onwards. Ute Scheub was 13 when her father (born 1913) took his own life. It was thanks to her mother and brothers who gave her the necessary emotional support that she was able to face up to and eventually come to terms with what her father had been and done. Translation rights available from Piper Verlag Georgenstr. 4 80799 Munich, Germany Tel: +49 89 30180126 Email: nicole.leppin@piper.de Nicole Leppin