In the Cellar

I read this book in German, so I can not comment on the prose of the translation. However, I thought this book was so incredible it was worth a review. Jan Philipp Reemtsma went through hell and back, not only on a physical level, but also on an emotional, psychological level. His description of the events is elegantly written and deeply personal - bringing the reader into the cellar with him and letting the reader understand his struggles and emotions. The book is not written as a suspensful story, but as a raw account of the truth. I recommend this to everyone who wants to read something real, something disturbing yet excellent.

Reemtsma, a 45-year-old German philologist worth $300-million, is kidnaped for ransom and held for thirty-three days chained to the wall in a dark cellar. This short book without chapters is about the trauma of that experience. This is an intensely personal study of being powerless and humiliated, of being reduced to something close to subhuman. But Reemtsma learns that the "he" who was held in that cellar (he won't call him "I") was not subhuman, but human in a different state, a state of "forced intimacy" with his captors.Reemtsma writes with a curious, but totally delineated sense of profound shame. He became, however unavoidably and however ephemerally, intimate with his captors, men who had terrorized not just him but his family and friends. This-a symptom of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages come to identify with and admire their abductors-is something so painful to this proud and highly respected man that he writes this book both to understand his experience and to exorcize it. In doing so he finds a dimension of himself and his humanity that he never knew existed.The details and the pure logistics of a $30-million abduction dragged out for thirty-three days are fascinating in themselves. The botched payoffs, the dangerous intrusion of the police, the furtive, awkward exchanges between the kidnapers and Reemtsma's family and friends, and especially the mundane and sordid details of his life in the cellar, illustrate with compelling force the horror of the crime of kidnaping. This is a fascinating and affecting book that, to my mind, allows Reemtsma to rise above the degradation of his abduction. The readable translation by Carol Brown Janeway and the beautiful presentation by Knopf make this a book worth owning.

Very rarely there comes a work of non-fiction which can be deeply moving and intellectually stimulating at the same time. Chapter 1 is enough of a hook. Chapter 2 is by turns thrilling and funny.Chapter 3 is all of the above plus sad and poetic. And the concluding Chapter 4 turns out to be a very philosophical anti-climax, which saves the book from turning into a Coen Brothers movie. Read it for yourself. You will want to read it over quickly and reread it right away, this time as slowly as you can, like the way a classic should be read!