Woe Betide Anyone who Steps out of Line

Following his father’s biography Ordnung ist das ganze Leben, Ludwig Harig gave us Weh dem, der aus der Reihe tanzt in 1990 – the account of his own life as a boy and young man growing up in the Third Reich. It is the story of a small-scale German tragedy that inevitably merges with the greater German cataclysm. After a sheltered childhood growing up in the vicinity of the French border, the young schoolboy was forced to fight against his
neighbour and »arch enemy« France – the country he would later call home as a student. – A moving testimony to the power of seduction and the impotence of reason – to the bitter end.
The text is complemented by thematically relevant excerpts from Harig’s later autobiographical records Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, as well as a detailed indexed commentary that helps to make the text accessible in both historical and biographical terms.