The Canadian historian Joseph Pearson lives in Berlin, where twentieth century history often remains a fraught landscape of contention and silence. To uncover the material for My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War (HarperCollins), Pearson embraced object-centred and object-driven history; his investigations spin out from a knife, diary, cookbook, cotton pouch and stringed instrument. Several times Pearson uses the analogy of a rug, and of history being presented as its neatly sewn-up front, rather than its messy back—the part of the process that interests him. Pearson looks at how everyday details of life, such as what we eat and what music we listen to, are intertwined with politics, and how those politics infused every aspect of life in Nazi Germany. Erna Jokisch was Joseph Goebbels’s cook, and from her Pearson teases out stories as seemingly banal as a recipe for salad dressing, small stories which show how ordinary people can absorb, accept and enable monstrous ideologies. “For the historian, recalling places and objects is strategic: you can invoke memories long buried by asking them ‘Have you ever been here?’ or simple questions such as, ‘Tell me about your favourite dress?’” Pearson expertly uses simple questions about objects to prompt stories which have been repressed or hidden for decades. In one chapter, Pearson interviews Erich Hartmann, a double bass player with the Berlin Philharmonic during the Nazi regime. Hartmann still frames the orchestra as apolitical, though they received elite privileges as a powerful source of state propaganda. Pearson looks into the provenance of Hartmann’s instrument, possibly stolen as part of Goebbels’s “procurement” program. He is unable to trace this particular instrument, but begins a detailed investigation into other instruments given to members of the Philharmonic through this program. Are these objects tainted by their dark history? Pearson shares these stories with musicians who play the instruments today, and each has complex responses to the revelations. My Grandfather’s Knife is an intensely entertaining book of history, recording eyewitness stories while rigorously engaging with ideas. The objects at the centre of the book remain powerful catalysts, fascinating in themselves but most important in their ability to illuminate human experiences.

—Kristina Rothstein