Tania Blanchard, Letters from Berlin. Sydney, NSW: Simon
and Schuster, 2020. xv + 430 pp.
Reviewed by Norman
Simms
This
is a novel purportedly based on the author’s own family who were caught up in
the Third Reich during World War Two. The main narrative is book-ended in a semi-fictional
Prologue and an Epilogue in which a middle-aged Ingrid tells her own daughter
Natalie the truth, after a whole life of not knowing who her biological
grandmother was. The true (that is, partly made-up) story is revealed through a
cache of letters written by her mother’s mother, Susie, during the war and the
years immediately following it. Ingrid, narrator of the end pieces, chose now to
reveal the story of her mother’s family to her own “heavily pregnant daughter” and
what had happened to them. The whole of the central narrative is supposedly a
joining together of Susie the grandmother’s story based on those letters and
filled out by imagination and intuition.
So we are told. I think. The relationships are complicated.
The
narrative begins on the eve of the war. Because of the aunt, who was a Russian Jew,
the whole family in Hitler’s Germany are almost constantly under threat and
need to protect one another from arrest, deportation and death. Susie, an
orphan, had been brought up in a country estate by her rich Unkle Georg and his
wife Aunt Elya. Susie and Leo, Georg and Elya’s son, are in love, but not ready
to go beyond flirtation. Another quasi uncle, Julius, somewhat older than Susie,
was also brought up on the estate when he was orphaned. The family thus
consists of a tangled web of relationships, loyalties and obligations. But due
to the Nazi race laws they are all implicated as mischlinge, mixed race, mixed marriage and mixed connections.
As
the Third Reich implements its racial policies and moves towards war, Julius
joins the Nazi Party and claims to be protecting the family through his
position in the directing of the railway system. When the screws are tightened
more, he asks Susie to, first, be his nominal fiancée and then, after luring
her further into the relationship, to marry him to help keep the Gestapo away
from “his family.” Susie, who is not yet out of her teens, agrees and gradually
grows closer and closer to this unctuous older man, appearing as his trophy
wife-to-be among the glitz and glamour of Nazi highlife..
It
is hard to believe she can remain so naïve and stupid throughout his courtship.
But the closer you read the novel, the more preposterous it all is. Aside from
a very few scenes, characters don’t really talk to one another: they make
formal speeches and barely feel the horrible things happening around them in
Germany. After Susie leaves university to study to be a nurse and then finds
work in a Red Cross hospital just outside of Berlin, she deals with agony,
suffering and death every day, walks home through streets littered with dead
and wounded from Allied bombing raids; but when her Unkle Georg is shot by an
SS soldier at home, she makes a sentimental speech about how fragile life
really is and that one could suddenly have to face death. Until she actually
sees official documents brought to her by Leo showing that Julius, whom she is
about to marry and is pregnant by, is a serial philanderer, is complicit in the
sending of thousands of Jews to extermination camps, she can’t believe how evil
he is. She also finally comes to see that Julius turned in his own long-time
friend and thus is responsible for Unkle Georg’s death, and has blatantly lied to her throughout
their relationship, But eve n when she says “I hate you,” she doesn’t stop
seeing him.
It
makes you want to scream at her, “Never trust a Nazi!” and throw the book on
the floor and stomp on it.
Certainly,
through long expository paragraphs and the speeches the various characters
address to one another, as well as in their internal thoughts, the outline of
the Nazi crimes and the course of the war is known. These passages might as
well be collected into a brief history of Germany from 1939 to 1947.
But
what they tell is made subordinate to the romance and sentimental tale of
family life. From this brief history, too, we learn that Leo and his parents
are part of the small German resistance movement and help smuggle a few Russian
POWs out of Germany and back to the Soviet Union. Susie helps them out by
passing on bits of information she overhears while dining in fancy restaurants,
waiting in grand hotel lobbies, and attending the opera with Julius. Leo and
Georg take a minor part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. None of that,
however, registers in the way they all speak or comport themselves in the
novel. Their sentence structures remain bland, the same from one end of the
book to the other, calm and unemotional. Their lives in the countryside,
despite ostracism and rude comments from some of the villagers the family has
supported for generations, remains a peaceful idyll. Mostly, too, the baddies—lecherous
SS men, viciously envious neighbours, confronting Soviet officers—are formal, polite,
and, as for the action, doors are shut when violence occurs. Later, after the
Red Army secures control over the region where the estate lies, though the
regional committee confiscates the manor house and send what is left of the
family packing, all this seems to happen with impeccable taste. I will not tell
you how the family gets separated, Susie marries Leo and has a child (the
daughter whom we meet in the Prologue and Epilogue), but becomes separated from
them. Eventually she comes to live in
Sydney, Australia, where she marries again and has a full life with children
and grandchildren.
“What
is going on here?” you may well ask. Is Tanya Blanchard exploiting the
suffering of other people, including the members of her own family slightly adjusted
to be characters in this novel, to
create her own fictional account of the terrible war years in Germany during
and after the war? After all, this is a complaint made by critics about other
novels inspired by true events, such as Takis Würger’s Stella (2020), although there the criticism is that the love story (between
the title character, a Berlin woman, and a Swiss art student caught in the city
during the war) and a mystery set “within a developing, expanding, horrifying
Holocaust” and consequently the narrator never adequately deals with any of “the
many plots and horrors.”.[i]
Sometimes the book reviewer of such a fiction
feels uncomfortable, misled and tricked by the author. Closely related to this
mixed aesthetic and epistemological set of questions, however, is another: the
feeling of discomfort and anger, when popular reviewers don’t sense anything
amiss, who take the motives, actions and events as simply give having a truth
that lies in precisely what is wrong, that is, when the horrors of war and the
even worse moral and criminal enormities of the Holocaust are normalized into
just bits of excitement, thrills of an escape tale, and insubstantial and
superficial grief at the level of sentimentality.
In
Letters from Berlin, has she—that is,
both the author Tanya Blanchard and her narrator Susie —no real understanding
about what the Nazis did and in the name of the German people, almost all of
whom were complicit or tacitly so during the Holocaust? Yet Blanchard’s work is
no children’s book or one explicitly meant for young adults, naïve readers who
cannot face up to the ugly truth yet. Nevertheless,
Susie as a young woman and then as an older grandmother excuses, rationalizes
away and trivializes the enormity of the crimes committed during the Third
Reich. Is this a version of the new myth that Germany and the German people
were the first victims of Hitler’s regime? And that somehow the Russian
occupiers and then the East German government were worse?
Well,
someone has compiled a list of ten discussion points at the end of Letters from Berlin, and this may tell
us something about how the publisher conceives of the probable audience for the
novel. First of all, not one of the questions has to do with the book as a work
of fiction based on supposedly true characters and events. They simply assume
that the story is true as an emotional account of good people caught up in a
bad situation. How is the plot line structured, chapters made to fit different
stages in the development of the characters, and how are people actually seen
to emerge from events? One of the fictions in the text is that everyone speaks,
thinks and feels in German, so that the English used is a stand-in for another
language with its own idioms, tones and rhythms. Germany had only been united
since 1870, and regional dialects were still strong, and rural people spoke and
saw the world quite differently from city dwellers, and especially different
from Berliners, who had an accent that everyone else remarked on. Surely this
has special importance when we know too that the Nazis twisted and abused the
German language and made it virtually impossible think or feel in a normal way.
Everything
turns on an early twenty-first century bourgeois family loyalty and the buzz
word identity. According to the
questions, readers are asked to compare their own experiences with those of the
people in the novel, as if those were generic, global and ahistorical values
(“human nature”). But there are no questions about how European attitudes might
have differed in the nineteenth century when most of the fictional family,
aside from children, were born, and certainly from contemporary Australia,
where Susie raises her own new family.
Then
the question perhaps should have been asked about whether you yourself (dear
reader) would have the courage, the stamina and the skill to oppose your own
government if it was manifestly going against civilization and civil morals.
Would you have risked your life and that of your loved ones in order to bring
about the death of Adolf Hitler and the downfall of the Nazi regime? Since
there were very few people during the period of 1932-1945 who actually did join
the German resistance and almost all of them were sent to concentration camps
or hanged, do you (reader) accept this idea that most Germans were good,
passive or indifferent and unaware of what was happening? Why was there no
large-scale movement to sabotage the German armed forces or railway and other
supply systems, as happened in France and Italy? Again, we have to ask about
this novel: What is it all about and who is responsible?
What
is the nature of evil, and is fighting against it—giving up your life, taking
the lives of others—a moral imperative? Was Hannah Arendt correct when she
spoke of “the banality of evil” in reference to Adolf Eichmann? Or is there
nothing banal at all about orchestrating the cruel murder of six million human
beings? Were the perpetrators of the Holocaust and its facilitators only
obeying orders and doing their duty to the laws of the land? Were ordinary
people who profited from the wholesale expropriation of food, clothing,
furniture, machinery and other wealth from Nazi conquered countries so unaware
of what was happening that they don’t share in the responsibility for the
things done in their name? Can we accept their cry-babying plea that they too
were as much victims as the Poles, the Gypsies and the Jews?
Or
to go further: Is there a special undertaking that non-Jewish writers assume
when they deal with events and victims of the Holocaust, even if it is only at
some fictional distance from the main action? Do readers have a share in this responsibility;
to agree tacitly not to read passively and superficially, but to take a
critical stance and, having decided to inform themselves of the context of such
stories, to examine their own backgrounds, life experiences and historical
knowledge of what really happened in the world? Though it is probably
unrealistic to ask many ordinary readers to do any such thing, nevertheless if one
is to ensure that such a monstrous breakdown in humanity as the Holocaust never
happens again, I cannot help posing the questions above rather than accepting those
listed in the back of this book.
[i]. Takis Würger, Stella, trans. Liesl Schillinger (London: Grove, 2020).
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