An Invisible Country, originally published in German and translated into English by Stephen Lehmann, casts a wide net over the dark psychology of Germany's 20th-century landscape, connecting his nation's involvement in two world wars with his personal memories.

Both memoir and political exposition, author Stephan Wackwitz's first book to appear in English is speckled with engaging prose that slowly unreels.

While detailing the author's globe-trotting experiences across Europe and Asia, the book is centered in a place called Anhalt, only 10 miles from Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp. His family, as revealed in these pages, "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk."

Wackwitz is a former leftist activist in post-war Germany. Born in 1952, seven years after the end of World War II, he explores his nation's pathological crimes and deep guilt through the words of his grandfather, Andreas Wackwitz, who recounted those troubling times in memoirs written for his family on onion-skin paper.

"I spent the night in Berlin," Wackwitz's grandfather writes. "The following day was January 30, 1933. The Schleicher government had resigned, and Hitler was chancellor."

His presence in the capitol on that fateful day, when the liberal Weimar Republic collapsed before the political accession of the fascist Reich, is eerily retold, the emotion drained from the words.

Wackwitz, the grandson, sees the clinical nature of the writing as a sign of guilt mixed with pride. "Subtle signs in my grandfather's description," he writes, "betray a feeling that his country and the entire world were becoming young once again."

The story unfurls itself like a tapestry, various elements cycling in and out of each chapter, only to be taken up again in later sections. Certain arcs and leitmotifs, woven in Proustian detachment, detail the bucolic setting of Anhalt, a town disputed over the years by Germany and Poland and unalterably close to the site where nearly 2 million Jews were annihilated with industrial precision.

Wackwitz delves deep into its history, going back to the Age of Reformation. He depicts something of a frontier life, like that of the American West in the 19th century.

But the townspeople - and their 20th-century responses to what was happening in neighboring Auschwitz - are rarely mentioned. Of his grandfather, the author writes, ". . . he chose to look away from neighbors who disappeared without a trace and without explanation, to look away from the open enslavement of foreigners . . ."

While the total effect of Wackwitz's writing builds to a harrowing and engrossing summation of German history, with the black hole of the Holocaust at its center, his willful obscurity sometimes stifles the narrative.

Wackwitz is a scholar of German literature, with a special emphasis on its philosophers and great thinkers. Quotations and aphorisms from these writers litter the text.

Established personalities, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud, are discussed, but so, too, are Johann Gottlieb Ficht, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Richard Rorty and Johann Hebel - names only someone with a fascination with German thought will find interesting.

But the author's powerful personal introspection is unmistakable. His mind almost flies through the trees around his childhood home, over the churches and factories, drawn to the spot that has become such a landmark of the 20th century's memory-scape, albeit one of unspeakable horror.

Kelly Lemieux is a freelance writer living in Denver.