In the Cellar

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, now forty-seven years old, inherited one of Germany's largest private fortunes. That wealth has made him a potential target all his life. He is also a brilliant intellectual, the founder and director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which has produced much important (sometimes unwelcome) scholarship about Germany's role in the twentieth century. That uncompromising honesty has made both him and the institute the focus of hate groups in recent years.

On the evening of March 25, 1996, in front of his house, Reemtsma was attacked, beaten, and abducted. He had no idea where he was going, why he had been taken, who his captors were, or whether he would survive. For the next thirty-three days, he lived chained by the ankle to the wall of a small cellar, the prisoner of kidnappers whose motives, it turned out, were not political but mercenary: they wanted $20 million in exchange for his life.

With incredible, unsparing honesty, driven by the will, he says, "to destroy the intimacy that was forced upon me," Reemtsma gives us a completely riveting day-by-day account of his life in the cellar: what it was like--emotionally, psychologically, and physically--and how he managed to survive. He describes the endless days pacing in chains until his ankles bled, the degrading gratitude he felt when given the most basic comforts (food, light, books), the anticipation and utter despair following two failed ransom exchanges, and, most of all, the oddly personal relationship he could not prevent himself from forming with the leader of the kidnappers. He also includes, in all their emotional nakedness, the incredibly moving notes he wrote to his wife and son.

Beyond the story itself, Reemtsma makes us understand what it is like to undergo such a trauma; how such an experience, despite a "happy" ending, can nonetheless destroy a person's inner balance; and, ultimately, how the cellar has become a place he now must recognize as part of himself.