Bonn mots: so whose memory is picture perfect? The 'Monthly' has a problem getting Manning Clark in frame

It is only several pages into Mark McKenna's article in the March issue of The Monthly that the reader learns about the focus of this finely-crafted essay about the historian Manning Clark. 'Of all Clark's epiphanies ... there is one that stands out for its allegorical power,' he writes, and recounts several instances between 1978 and 1991 in which Clark spoke or wrote about visiting Bonn on the morning after the Reichskristallnacht pogrom. McKenna demonstrates that Clark arrived in Bonn only on November 26, 1938, more than two weeks after the morning following the pogrom in which synagogues throughout Germany had been torched, Jewish businesses looted, and Jewish men carried off to concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Sachenhausen. He came to Bonn to visit Dymphna Lodewyckx, who later became his wife.