Image for Investigation: About my Father is Christoph Meckel's celebrated work of memoir or "father-biography" in the mould of Paul Kersten's Der alltAgliche Tod meines Vaters and Ruth Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel. The book is an act of need, personal and political: an attempt, by the son of a former German officer in the Second World War, to account not merely for his father's actions but for the actions of a generation. His compassion, his dexterity with the knife, his lack of sentiment when sentiment would only slow his hand, his seeing around...