"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it." So writes Reiner Schrmann in Origins , a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schrmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness, too, are the...