Max

The Lebensborn programme was devised by the German Nazi party. It involved the selective breeding of perfect Aryan children, blond and blue-eyed, from parents hand-picked for their racial purity. Max is the first baby produced by this genetic engineering project, born in 1936. Significantly he is also born on the birthday of the Führer Adolf Hitler.

The book is a first person narrative, a bildungsroman about Max’s upbringing and indoctrination. The book takes off when Max, despite the intense pressure on him, begins to question the values imposed by Nazism.

The first parts of this book strain the belief of the reader. Max’s thoughts and feelings not just from the moment of his birth but actually from before his birth, seem too rational and too coherent to command belief. It is as if the author is imposing adult thoughts on a child who even at the close of the narrative is less than ten years old.

The book presents its issues in graphic detail, including the processes of copulation and prostitution. Max displays a very limited range of emotions: emotions are for weaklings.

Cohen-Scali makes as good a job as possible in presenting the emergence of the Nazi ideology as a convincing phenomenon. However repellent the ideology, the reader can see how the intensity of indoctrination led people to accept it. They were brainwashed. For example Max describes as ‘rabbits’ the disabled children sent off under the T4 programme for medical experimentation or death. This book will cross over the barrier between older children and young adults. But it is not a book that could be enjoyed by younger readers, too unrelenting by far for that.