The Pilgrims’ Castle
On sale
21st January 2027
Price: £22
Selected:
ebook / ISBN-13: 9781473635425
‘I love Jon Day’s writing’ OLIVIA LAING
An investigative memoir uncovering a secret history of wartime hiding, a family’s hidden past, and its long-lasting legacy.
In the 1950s, Jon Day’s mother and her German-Dutch siblings came into contact with a secretive circle of writers, artists and intellectuals known as ‘Castrum Peregrini’. Led by the exiled German writer Wolfgang Frommel, the group was founded during World War II, when Frommel gave shelter to some of his young Jewish followers in a house in Amsterdam. The group followed the teachings of Stefan George, a renowned but controversial German poet who in the 1910s had led an elite coterie of young men to whom he preached a message of what he called ‘pedagogical eros’ – the belief that educational encounters were inherently sexual.
Growing up, Day heard stories of Wolfgang’s wartime heroism, of literature and poetry, of the power of friendship and camaraderie. But thirty years later he begins to hear different versions of the past. Interviewing his mother, other living members of ‘Castrum Peregrini’ and whistle-blowers, darker truths emerge – of psychological grooming and sexual abuse, shrouded in stories of resistance, bravery and spiritualty.
From the complex, contradictory and elusive mind of Wolfgang Frommel, to the wartime Castrum group – who lived as onderduikers in a grand but dilapidated canal house in Amsterdam – and the post-war years of ritualised poetry readings and recruitment to what some have called a cult, Day investigates the history that shaped the lives of many of his family members and their friends.
The Pilgrims’ Castle is a jaw-dropping, tender memoir about the silencing of abuse and the unravelling of one family’s history to expose the truths and mistruths we tell ourselves about the past.
An investigative memoir uncovering a secret history of wartime hiding, a family’s hidden past, and its long-lasting legacy.
In the 1950s, Jon Day’s mother and her German-Dutch siblings came into contact with a secretive circle of writers, artists and intellectuals known as ‘Castrum Peregrini’. Led by the exiled German writer Wolfgang Frommel, the group was founded during World War II, when Frommel gave shelter to some of his young Jewish followers in a house in Amsterdam. The group followed the teachings of Stefan George, a renowned but controversial German poet who in the 1910s had led an elite coterie of young men to whom he preached a message of what he called ‘pedagogical eros’ – the belief that educational encounters were inherently sexual.
Growing up, Day heard stories of Wolfgang’s wartime heroism, of literature and poetry, of the power of friendship and camaraderie. But thirty years later he begins to hear different versions of the past. Interviewing his mother, other living members of ‘Castrum Peregrini’ and whistle-blowers, darker truths emerge – of psychological grooming and sexual abuse, shrouded in stories of resistance, bravery and spiritualty.
From the complex, contradictory and elusive mind of Wolfgang Frommel, to the wartime Castrum group – who lived as onderduikers in a grand but dilapidated canal house in Amsterdam – and the post-war years of ritualised poetry readings and recruitment to what some have called a cult, Day investigates the history that shaped the lives of many of his family members and their friends.
The Pilgrims’ Castle is a jaw-dropping, tender memoir about the silencing of abuse and the unravelling of one family’s history to expose the truths and mistruths we tell ourselves about the past.
Reviews
Brave and clear-eyed and frequently devastating, The Pilgrims' Castle is a profound and necessary account of family myth, the risks of charisma and how lies can be easier to live with than the truth
A gripping inquiry into a mythologised past that conceals dark secrets . . . As Day delves into the Pilgrims' Castle, he compels us to reassess not just the legacy of this particular artistic sect, but our own assumptions about twentieth century history, human power dynamics, and the truth of memory. An empathic, important, riveting book
The story, uncomfortably profound, is of coming to terms, via deeper and deeper layers of shock, with the ugliness and pain of the past, both in your own family and a nation. It centres on occupied Amsterdam. But beneath the many tragic lives - which touch more familiar ones, from Anne Frank to Hitler's would-be assassins - it exposes the way that poetry, and the romance of male friendship, can be used to mask abuse
Jon Day has turned a sordid story of dark romanticism, a fraught national history, and sexual abuse into a thing of beauty. A splendid achievement