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Reviewed by Ray Simmons for Readers' Favorite
Ascension by Max Overton is the story of Konrad Wengler, a German Jew “passing” as a German who isn’t Jewish in the Germany of the early and middle years of the twentieth century. Ascension is a powerful and moving look into German society at that particular time and Konrad Wengler’s eyes and experiences are the perfect vehicle with which to describe this tragic era. I first heard the term “passing” to describe an African-American of mixed race who is so fair-skinned that they could “pass” as white in pre-civil rights era America. (There is an excellent film on the subject called Imitation of Life) In order for Konrad to pass as a good German, all he has to do is deny the heritage and memory of a long-dead loving mother. The exact moment when the young Konrad makes the decision to do just that is told in painful detail in the prologue of Ascension. The prologue is so accurate and frightening in its portrait of the cruelty and inhumanity children are capable of that it’s painful to read.
In my opinion, Max Overton has created a classic in Ascension. It is one of those books everyone should read. Ascension is powerful, not because of the depictions of cruelty, but because of how deftly Max Overton shows that this is not a phenomenon created by the Nazis or the Germans but something dormant in all of us just waiting for the right set of social circumstances to bloom and run amok.
