His Story
The Chronicles of Hans B. Grueber
ISBN
Forthcoming
Description
Hans B. Grueber was two years old when his hometown of Wuppertal was bombed by Allied forces, unleashing a firestorm that incinerated much of the city centre. Years later, in a high school history lesson, he sat through a documentary on the liberation of the concentration camps. ‘Some of us fainted, some vomited, some walked out — but we never forgot.’
As a university student, Hans smuggled banned books across the Berlin Wall to friends trapped in communist East Berlin. In Paris during the student revolts, he fled down Boulevard Saint-Michel as police truncheoned protesters. He was studying at UC Berkeley when a National Guard helicopter tear-gassed anti–Vietnam War demonstrators on campus. As a young lawyer, he stood in the Hamburg High Court as defence counsel for a fringe member of the Baader–Meinhof gang.
When acid rain and fears of nuclear war weighed heavily in Germany, Hans’s dream of a South Seas paradise grew stronger. He ‘retired’ and emigrated to New Zealand with his young family, pursuing another dream — devoting time to hischildren.
Arriving in 1984, he stepped into the upheaval unleashed by Roger Douglas’s neoliberal reforms. Many New Zealanders have benefited from his inability to walk past injustice, and he writes perceptively about the country’s fraying social equity following the rise of neoliberalism. His conviction that government exists to serve all people — not merely the wealthy and powerful — made it impossible for Hans to stand by while big business and career politicians sought to defeat the country’s MMP referendum.
After more than eighty years lived with eyes wide open, this is his story.
About the author
I started this book as a lockdown project during the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve had a richly fulfilling life, so have many tales to pass on, and would like my children and grandchildren to know their family heritage. A few years ago, at almost 90 years old, my elder brother Fritz died, and with him, his knowledge and connection to our ancestors. He had known all our grandparents, whereas I, being much younger, knew only one grandmother, so I relied on him to tell me the family tales.
Then over the time of writing, editing, and rewriting my tale, I realised it is more than a personal family history. This is the story of two countries on opposite sides of the world as seen through my experiences and observations.
My life has been split almost equally between Germany where I was born, and my adopted country New Zealand, but I have also lived in France and the USA at interesting historical times, and travelled extensively with my eyes wide open. Nowadays, looking at the old photographs and documents, I feel incredibly enriched by my experiences, which I believe have given me wisdom; I have seen it all, yet am still living through events such as Covid-19, and lately one man’s dismantling of the post-World War II world order. I wonder if I should be grateful not to live to see the consequences.