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Tag Archives: 1944

Rocket Terror: V2

22 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, book review, Britain, British intelligence, Germany, historical fiction, London, no and furthermore, Robert Harris, Scheveningen, sexism, terror weapon, thriller, V2 rockets, Wernher von Braun, World War II

Review: V2, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2020. 312 pp. $29

In late November 1944, the Germans rain V2 rockets on London, killing hundreds of civilians, and destroy thousands of homes at supersonic speed. Once the rockets launch from the Dutch coast, they take mere minutes to cross the North Sea and land with no warning save for a last-second shift in air pressure. By that time, it’s too late to seek shelter. The V2, named for Vergeltung, meaning “retribution” or “payback,” is more terrifying and arbitrary than any weapon previously known.

One morning, Kay Caton-Walsh, a young officer in Britain’s women’s air service (WAAF) discovers this firsthand. Shacking up for the weekend with a high-ranking (and married) Air Ministry official, she’s lucky to survive a rocket attack, as is her lover. That gives her extra motivation, as if she needed any, to return to her work, which involves analyzing aerial photographs of potential launch sites. The RAF has tried many times to take them out but always fail. So the V2s keep coming, seemingly from nowhere, and entire blocks of London keep getting smashed. Kay would like to fight back more effectively — and when word comes of a mission to track them from Belgium, she persuades her lover to have her sent there.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rudi Graf, a rocketry expert and longtime colleague of Wernher von Braun, who runs the V2 program, prepares the missiles for launch in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen. He has little fear of the RAF, whose raids strike the town, surrounding area, or the seashore, never the launch sites. But he does fear the SS, which has strengthened its grip on every aspect of the war effort and looks over his shoulder constantly, sniffing for disloyalty or its perceived equivalent, lack of patriotic zeal.

Wernher von Braun, center, facing, wearing the Nazi Party lapel pin, talks to Fritz Todt, center, Peenemünde, March 1941. Todt’s slave laborers died by the thousands to build von Braun’s underground rocket works there (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And indeed, Graf is no zealot. He tries not to think about what the rockets he has developed actually do to London, or what that means. For the most part, he succeeds at putting action and effect in different compartments of his mind. But Braun originally recruited him to investigate the feasibility of space travel, and Graf can’t separate theory from practice or justify one to the other so easily. He wonders what he’s doing there.

The sixth Harris novel I’ve read, V2 feels the weakest. A few trademarks make their appearance, all right — a sure grasp of history, mastery of detail, physical descriptions. Wherever the narrative goes, Harris grounds you in the scene, whether a London street, a ministerial office, a launch site, or a brothel, all delivered with economy. Early on, for instance, you see how the war has completely changed Scheveningen:

Rain was gusting off the sea, funneled down the side streets between the abandoned hotels. The pier had burned down the previous year. Its blackened iron spars protruded above the running white-capped waves like the masts of the shipwreck. The beach was sown with barbed wire and tank traps. Outside the railway station a few tattered tourist posters from before the war showed a pair of elegant women in striped bathing costumes and cloche hats tossing a ball to one another.

However, unlike, say, An Officer and a Spy, The Second Sleep, or Dictator, the author focuses on public stakes almost to the exclusion of his characters, which results in a less thrilling thriller. By that, I mean plot points like a rocket launch or Kay’s analysis efforts provide most of the tension, fairly humdrum, with few “no — and furthermore” moments, because the characters’ inner lives fail to color the events or enlarge them in significance.

I really don’t care whom Kay sleeps with. Despite feminist overtones to the WAAF war contribution, she’s too much a sex object for my taste, and the love affair that gets her a much sought-after assignment feels contrived. On the other hand, I do want to know what about the rockets compels her; saying she wishes to do something important or useful doesn’t suffice. After all, the war affects every aspect of life, and there are many ways to serve.

Graf has a little more to him; you see the scientist trapped into serving weaponry, though it’s a trap he willingly entered. But, unlike the case with other Harris novels, I don’t see his deep passion or resistance. Mostly, he seems tired and wishes he could somehow take action, though in what way, he’s not sure.

If, however, you want to read a fast-moving outline of how the V2 rockets came to exist and how they worked, this book may satisfy you. You also see why Wernher von Braun deserved a war-crimes trial rather than a cushy job in America’s space program. But if you’ve never read a Robert Harris thriller, don’t start with this one.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, which shares its profits with independent bookstores.

Occupation Confection: The Baker’s Secret

25 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, book review, cliché narrative, commercial fiction, France, German Occupation, historical fiction, Normandy, resistance, Stephen P. Kiernan, two-dimensional characters, World War II

Review: The Baker’s Secret, by Stephen P. Kiernan
Morrow, 2017. 308 pp. $27

By June 1944, the German Occupation weighs heavily on the Norman coastal village of Vergers. The Germans confiscate whatever food the villagers grow or catch, deport men of working age to their armaments factories, and delight in summary executions. One person they shoot is Ezra Kuchen, the baker; the villager who takes his death the hardest is his assistant, Emmanuelle, known as Emma.

Emma would never dream of joining the Resistance, whose activity she blames for other losses, and who believes the Allies will never invade, so what’s the point? But willy-nilly, Emma becomes the prime mover in a complicated barter arrangement whose weblike strands encompass the whole village, and which the Germans would certainly call resistance. Her treason centers around baking bread for the occupiers, which she cuts with enough straw to make extra loaves for neighbors in need. In each loaf, she carves a subtle V.

Each morning required every gram of Emma’s skills, all of her artifice, to bake loaves containing straw and have neither the Kommandant nor his officers notice. Yet this was only one of five hundred deceits, all conceived during the long strain of the occupation. She learned to sow a minefield and reap eggs. She could wander the hedgerows pulling a rickety cart, and the result would be maps. She could turn cheese into gasoline, a light bulb into tobacco, fuel into fish. She could catch, butcher, and divide among the villagers a pig that later every person who had tasted it would insist had never existed.

I like this part of the novel the best, and not only because of Emma’s ingenuity. Every fiber of her duplicity exists to satisfy someone else’s wants, which she at first resents, because they leave no room for her own. But over time, she realizes that throwing herself into feeding others gives her a reason to live despite her pessimism, and keeps her from dwelling on her repressed desires, which would drive her mad. When someone tells her to have hope, she snaps, “Can that be eaten? What does it taste like?” But since the novel opens on June 5, 1944, the reader knows what’s coming before she does.

Having written about military occupations and traveled Normandy, I was looking forward to The Baker’s Secret. (My fondest memory of the many French walking trails I’ve followed is of Calvados, where a group of local hikers pressed wine and food on me and told me how grateful they felt to Americans for having liberated them.) I gobbled up this confection of a novel in just about one sitting, which says something about its excellent pacing, but I felt hungry soon afterward. The story pleases, but, except for Emma, the characters have no depth, and the fable-like tone makes it hard to tell whether to take the narrative’s real tragedies seriously.

I took this photo in 2015, near the Norman village of Thury-Harcourt, an area that saw heavy fighting several weeks after the invasion.

One weak link is the German soldiery. Unlike the case with All the Light We Cannot See, to which this book will inevitably (and wrongly) be compared, Kiernan’s occupiers deal out plenty of brutality. But they’re stiff, utterly predictable marionettes who act like no soldiers I’ve ever read of or seen, let alone like the Wehrmacht. They are easily fooled, spout racial and political prejudices like windup toys, seem not to understand their own weaponry, and even invite Emma to a place where she can see their fortifications, which they then boast of to her. They’re not buffoons, exactly; more like a collection of bumbling neurotics with guns.

Just as the Germans are unreal enemies, the villagers are improbable, idealized good guys. They’re more like a foreigner’s idea of what French people must be like, with generic, styled modes of expression, attitudes, and descriptions. Further, I don’t believe that Vergers has a Jewish baker, that Ezra Kuchen is Jewish, or that the villagers would honor him in death so fervently. He’s a cliché, a blatant device, and, incidentally, the only villager to possess a last name, whose meaning (“cake”) is no subtler than anything else in this story. Kiernan tries hard to evoke Emma’s fear that someone in Vergers will betray her, but you know they won’t; they’re too righteous. Over time, a candidate presents himself, but he’s so roundly detested that you expect his duplicity rather than fear it.

I appreciate Kiernan’s attempt to show the cruelties perpetrated during the Occupation, and to portray the violence of the invasion as a decidedly mixed blessing for the people of Normandy. But The Baker’s Secret, though it has its poignant moments, teeters between cartoonish fable and skewed reality, and leaves me unsatisfied.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Narrow Fiction: The Cherry Harvest

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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1944, characterization, farm life, German prisoners-of-war, historical fiction, Lucy Sanna, sexual mores, trite fiction, twentieth century, Wisconsin, World War II

Review: The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
Morrow, 2015. 321 pp. $26

You know what must happen next. It’s spring 1944, and Thomas Christiansen, a Wisconsin cherry farmer who’ll lose his orchards if he doesn’t get help for the harvest, asks the U.S. Army to supply German prisoner-of-war labor. His wife, Charlotte, though she’d do anything to save the farm or ease her daily struggle to put food on the table, has severe misgivings. Her favorite child, Ben, is with the army facing German bullets, and Charlotte wants no Nazis near her house, especially nowhere near her beautiful, innocent, teenage daughter, Kate.

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Cave Point County Park, Door County, Wisconsin (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Charlotte never expresses her feelings, except about Ben, but for some reason, she’s dissatisfied with her marriage. Her husband, though hardworking, is a mild-mannered intellectual type who’d much rather be running a bookstore, and the physical spark she once felt for him has lessened considerably since Ben went to war. Thomas is always quoting poetry and talking about books with Kate, a subject that Charlotte disdains when she’s not feeling jealous. Naturally, however, she won’t discuss any of this, because her answer to every problem is to shut up and soldier on.

So am I spoiling anything by saying that it’s Charlotte, not Kate, who has an affair with a German prisoner? Further, the jacket flap gives away that Ben returns wounded, though you’d have guessed that too. And when you read, early on, that he romanced the girl next door at a dance, you need no crystal ball to figure what kind of wound he has. As for yet another dose of predictable, when Kate nearly drowns in a lake and washes up at a fancy vacation home, who should rescue her but a handsome senator’s son, who’s smitten with her from the get-go and promises to fulfill all her dreams? That said, however, I do like the scenes in which she tries to mingle among his posh friends, which capture what a poor, simple farm girl trying to pass in La-La Land would feel like, including her reaction at a bathroom large enough to live in.

My point isn’t to beat The Cherry Harvest into the ground, but to figure out what went wrong. Sanna has tried valiantly to re-create a moment in time, and though I don’t really believe we’re back in 1944, particularly, I do believe we’re in Door County, Wisconsin, during hard times, and farm life comes through loud and clear. She’s got an excellent premise to work from, and Charlotte’s a mess, which means she has potential.

So what could Sanna have done differently? Let’s start with Ben, who, though a crucial character, doesn’t show up until fifty pages from the end. Aside from rare smiles or jests, he’s a hundred percent the angry, bitter, young warrior, spiraling out of control, repelling everybody faster than you can shout, “Incoming!” because, well, the novel has to end. Thomas has possibilities, but, aside from an explanation that he has the farm only because he inherited it, we see only that he’s forgiving, reasonable, thoughtful, and everything else a patient, long-suffering husband should be. At one point, Charlotte wonders, briefly, whether he had another life before they met, an instance of authorial telegraphy that repeatedly mars this novel. But we never witness his soul-stirring. Nor do we get past the surface of Karl, the English-speaking German who tutors Kate in math (natch; what Germans are expert at, ja?) and makes love to her mother. He’s got a feral side that draws Charlotte, but the rest of him is blank, aside from his many declarations that Germans are good people, just like Americans. It was all Hitler’s fault, you see.

When he says that, I’m waiting for Charlotte, proud of her Norwegian heritage, to blurt out, or at least think, Then what the hell are you SOBs doing in Norway? Or the rest of Europe, for that matter, where surely she knows that goodness has folded its tent long ago. But nobody says anything like that, only repeats that Ben has been fighting them, so they have no place on the farm.

What kills The Cherry Harvest for me, then, is its narrowness. If you’re going to whistle an old, hackneyed tune, add a harmony or three, an improvisation, a surprise, an unexpected duet or trio. Charlotte clearly has an Oedipal entanglement with her son, but we don’t know why he’s her special child. Likewise, Kate never resents playing second fiddle, nor does Thomas question his wife’s obsession. As for Karl, he could be a fascinating character, someone who entices Charlotte but also repels her for who he is, not just the uniform he wore. Instead, he rescues her from rape, and the prisoner who assaults her is the badass nobody likes, who so happens to have a scarred face. Compounding these literary felonies, Sanna has Charlotte fantasize all too easily about a life with Karl, though never really developing the idea, just dropping it in, only to dispense with it even more quickly two pages later.

Pure, uncomplicated qualities–and their inevitably flimsy transitions–make for weak fiction; they’re Hollywood. Round them out, give them depth through complexity. That’s what The Cherry Harvest fails to do.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Dabblers at War: The Race for Paris

05 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, D-Day, feminism, France, historical fiction, liberation of Paris, Meg Waite Clayton, Normandy, occupation, romance, sexism, twentieth century, war correspondents, World War II

Review: The Race for Paris, by Meg Waite Clayton
Harper, 2015. 311 pp. $26

Jane Tyler, a fledgling reporter from a Nashville paper, and Olivia (Liv) Harper, a young photographer from New York, are covering the American army following the D-Day landings in Normandy. Or, rather, they’re trying to, but the prejudice against female journalists prevents them from gaining accreditation to the front lines. So they sweet-talk Fletcher, a British intelligence photographer who happens to be a good friend of Liv’s husband, to drive them through the war zone, against all regulations. Their goal: To get to Paris the moment the city is liberated and score a scoop.

Fletcher’s ability to roam anywhere seems a mite improbable, as does his job, taking pictures of enemy installations that somehow prove of instant use. But no carping, here. Fletcher has always been sweet on Liv; he takes a liking to Jane too, who returns the feeling; and their adventures make for gripping reading. The whole setup offers a terrific opportunity for exploring feminist themes, which Clayton clearly wishes to do. And having recently returned from a hiking trip to Normandy (see my photo, below), I was primed for a story like this.

t's hard to believe that these hills near St.-Martin-de-Sallen were the scene of bloody fighting in August 1944.

It’s hard to believe that these quiet, bucolic hills near St.-Martin-de-Sallen, Normandy, were the scene of bloody fighting in August 1944.

The Race for Paris focuses on the victims of both sides. To that end, Clayton underlines American excesses or mistakes, as with the intentional destruction of St.-Lô, or when friendly fire kills or wounds hundreds of soldiers in their foxholes, an incident that never made the press. We’ve heard so much puffery about the Greatest Generation and the good fight, it’s refreshing to read a novel daring to point out that our boys were human after all. And Clayton excels at depicting the carnage, the waste, the poignancy, in prose that often attains effortless beauty.

Nevertheless, she seems too rigorous in her intent. It’s not just that she can’t make up her mind whether she’s writing historical fiction or history, as when she borrows a well-known quote about St.-Lô and lets her characters hear it, a self-conscious you-are-there moment that undercuts an otherwise touching scene. Nor is it Jane’s startling omniscience, when, out of nowhere, she somehow acquires a theoretical grasp of an immense, fluid battlefront that nobody could have observed through the cracked window of a wandering jeep.

Rather, it’s Jane’s moral omniscience, which comes without a struggle, that absolutely kills this book for me. It’s one thing to view Germans and Allies as victims and see individual circumstance as paramount, but it’s another to make that judgment willfully ignorant of the context. The narrative says nothing about the Occupation, except that it’s “brutal,” or to note that children look painfully thin. Nor does Clayton show collaboration or even mention the Gestapo or the SS–whose crimes right after D-Day were arousing great fury–or the Holocaust. She does drag in a few Jews at the end, but I’m not buying.

I’m not saying Clayton should have had her characters discuss all these things; that would have sounded canned and ruined the narrative. Still, Liv and Jane seem unconscious of what’s happening–and what has happened–around them, which spares them the difficulty of having to make complex choices based on inconvenient facts. It also makes them lousy journalists.

Take, for instance, the moment when they witness the signature cliché of the liberation, a man shaving a woman’s head because she slept with a German. Naturally, Liv and Jane vent their outrage on the man who holds the scissors; Fletcher attempts to stop him, in vain. But he also tries to tell his companions that the scene may be more complicated than they know, that the woman probably informed on her fellow villagers or lived high while they starved. To no surprise, given their role in this novel, Liv and Jane shout him down. He can’t be sure, they say, and in retrospect, they may be right. From the holes historians have punched in the legend of near-universal French resistance, it’s just as likely the hair-cutter was himself a collaborator or simply looking to inflict his righteous hatred on a powerless victim.

But the Americans’ snap judgment, their own self-righteousness in quashing what Fletcher says, belies their job to gather the facts, to understand what they’re snapping pictures of or writing in their dispatches. It’s that comfort in ignorance, the failure even to recognize a wider context, let alone try to grasp it, that turns these potential feminist heroines into dabblers, precisely the perception they’re struggling against. The men who’d deny them access to the battlefront, who resent their presence, disparage their abilities, and assume that their only talent is their physical appearance, would have said, “You see, dear, this is men’s business, and you really do know nothing about it.”

Had the narrative lingered on the shearing scene to explore whether a woman’s lot in war is to pay for men’s mistakes, that would have been a feminist statement. But the author has paced her story too quickly for that, seldom lifting the feminist lens beyond the premise that two young women have crashed a men’s club. I wanted to see Liv and Jane challenge what they might have been taught as girls or hesitate the least little bit about the allegedly masculine role they were choosing. What feminism takes for granted today was much newer and scarier in 1944; the 1960s hadn’t happened yet, but again, the novel feels retrospective, as though all that had gone before. The love triangle with Fletcher offers rich ground for a feminist conundrum, especially what it means to be attracted to a man who is, after all, their savior and guide, the traditional male figure. But Clayton doesn’t go there, leaving us with the same old story. What a shame.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

How Historical Accuracy Matters: Madeleine’s War

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, D-Day, espionage, France, historical accuracy, historical fiction, Peter Watson, plausibility, romance, Special Operations Executive, twentieth century, World War II

Review: Madeleine’s War, by Peter Watson
Doubleday, 2015. 367 pp. $27

It’s spring 1944, and Matthew Hammond, a colonel in British intelligence, has a torrid romance with the strikingly beautiful Madeleine Dirac, a French-Canadian woman he’s training for a very dangerous assignment. To prepare for the Allied invasion of France, rumored to be imminent, Madeleine will parachute into the country to help coordinate Resistance attacks on German transport and communications. Her survival chances are fifty-fifty, at best, so Matt can only hope that he’s taught the woman he loves the skills she’ll need to make it through.

Watson, who has written social and intellectual history and a couple novels, has taken a risk here. To tell this story, he’s abandoned both the nuts-and-bolts of Allied intelligence operations in France and its historical record, of which other fictional accounts include Simon Mawer’s Trapeze, Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, and Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers. Such a departure can work, so long as the fiction feels compelling, fresh, authentic, and logical within itself. Depict deep characters whose struggles strike a chord, and it will matter less that the nuts and bolts don’t quite fit the historical template. Unfortunately, however, Madeleine’s War goes in the other direction, toward the ordinary, the predictable, the cliché.

Jacket photo Patricia Turner/Arcangel Images (Courtesy Nan Talese/Doubleday)

Jacket photo Patricia Turner/Arcangel Images (Courtesy Nan Talese/Doubleday)

Col. Hammond’s organization, SC2, is supposedly modeled after the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. But SC2 has peculiar ways of winning the war. Madeleine’s job interview consists of a night drop over the English countryside, which, as she soon learns, entails interrogation as a potential enemy agent, during which she’s stripped naked. (Never mind that as an untrained parachutist, she could have broken her neck, or that a soldier could have shot her, causing a security leak and a needless death.) The “mission” tells Matt all he wants to know, including her bra size, but does she resent being humiliated and turned into a sex object? No. During training in Scotland, Madeleine throws herself at him, finding further opportunities to remove her clothes. How, you may ask, does Matt have the time to train agents–only four at a crack, to boot–when he should be in London managing operations? Then again, how does anyone in SC2, let alone a senior officer, conduct an affair without getting court-martialed? Matt and Madeleine aren’t even discreet, taking a walk on a beach and a bicycle outing. Yet nobody raises an eyebrow, lending further evidence that this allegedly top-secret military operation is really a summer camp with occasional brisk exercise.

Consequently, the narrative must work overtime so that Matt and Madeleine can be together. The setup also allows Matt to narrate the rest of the novel from his office, denying the reader the chance to see Madeleine in action or even hear her own voice. It’s his war, not hers.

That pushes all the chips onto the romance, and it’s a bad bet. These people come straight out of a male fantasy in which the woman is gorgeous, undemanding, vivacious, and always willing, while (to reveal the predictable) the man has the chance to rescue her. That she’s something of a ninny–she admires Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker, as “an opportunist”–doesn’t seem to matter.

Matt’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, himself. He constantly states the obvious and amazes himself and others with it, so that they come off no brighter than he is. But that’s partly because of the author’s narrative technique: In scene after scene, one character lectures another to advance the plot or reveal their past, often to say what they should both already know. And considering the security breaches that occur on virtually every page, if these people had actually led British intelligence, the Germans would have driven the Normandy invasion back into the Channel.

Which brings me to my final point, the novel’s trivial conception of espionage. To name only one example, when an ace agent of SC2 returns from two years in the field, Matt notices that he has a pock-marked face and a congenital stoop. It’s as if Matt has never seen him before–odd, if he trained the man–but it’s his reaction that matters here. The spymaster thinks, How brilliant; our agent is so obviously unathletic, unfit for military service, and that’s why the Germans thought him harmless.

But if the SOE had actually given this man a field assignment, he’d have posed an immediate risk to himself and others. An agent had to be fit, to conduct operations and stand a greater chance of escape, if necessary. His or her best–only–protection was to blend into the population. This fellow would have stuck out in any crowd, and the Gestapo would have spotted him right away. The word harmless wasn’t in their lexicon. They terrified a continent because they assumed that anyone could turn traitor, at any moment–and they’d be there when it happened.

That fear never shapes Madeleine’s War, never reaches the reader. I simply couldn’t connect with these shallow characters and their far-fetched actions and motives.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

No Time for Morality: Motherland

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, air raids, euthanasia, everyday life, Germany, Hadamar, historical fiction, Holocaust, home front, Jews, Maria Hummel, survival, sympathy, World War II

Review: Motherland, by Maria Hummel

Counterpoint, 2014. 375 pp. $26

The year 1944 is coming to a screaming, bloody close in Germany, but the war goes on, demanding ever more sacrifice. Frank Kappus, a reconstructive surgeon in Hannesburg, a spa town outside Frankfurt, has been drafted to an army hospital in Weimar. Two months widowed, he has remarried so that his three sons, the youngest of whom is an infant, have a mother to care for them while he’s gone.

Liesl, his new bride, must feed, clothe, and bring up three children who don’t know her. Food and clothing are impossible to find; air raids worsen life every day; the two elder boys run wild; and the neighbors treat her with suspicion and dislike, glad to tell her that she’s nothing like her beautiful, friendly, fun-loving predecessor. She’s done nothing wrong, but of course, that’s not enough. “The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.” And Liesel sticks out, leading people to wonder what secrets she has to protect.

One secret concerns eight-year-old Anselm (called Ani), the middle child, already young for his years, who’s been acting strangely, showing signs of cognitive damage, if not mental disturbance. A doctor has told Liesl that Ani may need to be evaluated at Hadamar, a psychiatric hospital where, it is whispered, the unfit are put to death. Frank Winkelmann Hadamar What Liesl does to keep him and her two other boys safe requires a remarkable degree of inner strength, which, she realizes, may vanish in an unguarded moment. Like the fine novelist she is, Hummel has set herself and her protagonist a tall task, for Liesl isn’t quite cut out for struggle. She grew up in her aunt and uncle’s home, treated like a servant among her six cousins:


Liesl had excelled at gratitude. She ate it for supper, always the last to be served. She wore it on her back, always clothed in her aunt’s stained, cast-off jumpers. She listened to it all night, positioned as nurse outside each incoming baby’s room, ordered to wake if he cried.


Meanwhile, Frank has his own troubles. He plans to desert if the Russians break through, only a matter of time, but that’s a deadly game. His superior, Captain Schnell (!) seems more devoted to punishing subversion than running a hospital, and when Frank hears a rumor that the medical officer at nearby Buchenwald may be infecting the inmates with typhus, Schnell warns him not to be curious. Frank takes the hint.

I admire much about Motherland, a novel head and shoulders above the other two I’ve reviewed here about wartime Germany (City of Women, David R. Gilham, December 11, 2014; The Undertaking, Audrey Magee, March 19). Hummel can make even a visit to the kitchen a tense occasion, and she captures the atmosphere of fear and deprivation without resorting to cartoon Nazis or melodrama. She’s also an excellent prose stylist. Women’s faces “looked as if someone had fixed their dread in stone.” Dust gathers on furniture, “as if it were ever so slowly growing a beard.” It’s details like these, rooted firmly in the mundane, that tell the story of day-to-day survival.

Yet Hummel lets her characters off the moral hook, despite her best efforts. She explains that she based her novel on family history, notably a series of letters that say nothing about the death camps or the totalitarian state, only about trying to cope. Okay. She resisted the temptation to allow her characters acts of resistance–wisely, I think–and says it hurt to leave out all but scant references to Jews or the Holocaust. (One brilliant, subtle description evokes the death camps and crematoria in a different, unexpected context.)

Fair enough. I accept that ordinary people, just trying to remain overlooked, would focus instead on where their next meal was coming from, especially when the bombs are falling. However, it’s those bombs that Liesl doesn’t think about, as in why Germany’s enemies are so relentless, or why the war has lasted so long. Nor does she ever connect the dots between the laws that may send Ani to Hadamar and those that condemn Jews.

Buchenwald was built in 1937, the first such camp on German soil, so Frank can’t be completely ignorant of what its purpose is, even if he’s never heard that inmates are injected with typhus. But he simply doesn’t think about it. Nor does he ever stop to consider that the horribly maimed men he treats have their counterparts on the other side. Nor, more broadly, does he reflect on what war has done to Europe.

Nevertheless, I could settle with this–in fact, I did, for almost the whole novel–except for the outrage that Liesl, in particular, expresses against the Americans. What they do is so unjust and heavy-handed, she believes, and I sense that the reader is meant to sympathize with her. But I can’t, not about this. Liesl never grapples with anyone else’s sufferings or how they might have come about. To me, Hummel squanders the empathy for Liesl and Frank that she’s so carefully built.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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Roxana Arama

storyteller from a foreign land

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For lovers of reading, crime writing, crime fiction

madame bibi lophile recommends

Reading: it's personal

History Imagined: For Readers, Writers, & Lovers of Historical Fiction

Suzy Henderson

What's new and old in historical fiction

Flashlight Commentary

What's new and old in historical fiction

Diary of an Eccentric

writings of an eccentric bookworm

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