The narrator and his family are out of town - and the eighty-year-old father looks after the house. Upon their return, the homecomers find an unsettling email exchange by their father, involving a million-dollar fortune that is to be transferred to Germany. A quick research makes it clear: he has been tricked by a con man who robbed him of his last pennies.
After his father’s death, this incident becomes the starting point for Kleeberg’s reflections and, ultimately, a true investigation of his father’s life: A lone fighter who refused all social affiliations, who grew up in difficult conditions but fought his way across the devastated country alone as a 14-year-old, and worked his way up after the war.
Yet he was never able to shake off the political and social traces of a childhood under the Nazis. He was a man torn between prejudices, decorum, and the urge to escape, to whom money and status mattered a great deal, but who also constantly undermined his own achievements. He wanted to make something better of his son, causing a love-hate relationship to develop between them, marked by rivalry, a desire for revenge, but also profound tenderness.
Kleeberg’s investigation is both an unsparing analysis and an affectionate attempt to better understand his father. A journey through the German history of the 20th century. And a painful self-interrogation: How much of my father is in me? How much did his generation’s attitudes shape the Federal Republic?
"'Glücksritter' is a wonderful, a deeply truthful, magnificent book." – Glanz und Elend
