Tragedy and Comedy in the Life and Writings of Thomas Mann

I came across something interesting the other day in a biography of Thomas Mann that I picked up to read alongside one of Mann's novels. Well, naturally, there were interesting facts on every page, but a couple of passages in Chapter 25 jumped out at me, perhaps all the more since the ideas addressed there were not elaborated on or discussed at length.

Ten years after the end of the war [WWI], French troops were still occupying the Rhineland, and reparations payments were still outstanding. In August 1928, Stresemann [German chancellor] finally persuaded France to consider early withdrawal and to authorize a new review of reparations. In February 1929 an American banker, Owen Young, headed an international board which in August submitted its assessment to a conference at The Hague. The plan was to give the German economy a chance to expand by allowing reparations to be spread over the next thirty years, and the date settled for the evacuation of the Rhineland was June 30, 1930. [Hayman, p. 391. Italics are my emphases.]

I was always told — and maybe you learned it this way, too — that Germany’s motives in supporting Hitler and launching a Second World War stemmed from the burden of reparations exacted on them from the First World War. And I’m not saying that isn’t part of the story. But what of this plan to ease the burden? Further down on the same page of the Mann biography came another event from the same year that seems to have exacerbated greatly economic conditions in Germany. 

Streseman died early in October 1929, and at the end of the month the Wall Street crash precipitated an international crisis. During the winter, unemployment in Germany reached the point at which the state’s insurance scheme could no longer pay benefits. …Mein Kampf was selling a steady fifty thousand copies a year. With unemployment rising, morale sinking, extremist demagogues and uniformed thugs active in the streets with truncheons and collecting boxes, membership in the Nazi party rose from 120,000 in 1929 to 800,000 in 1931. Members were contributing 300,000 marks a month, which few of them could afford, to a party that was acting less in their interests than in those of the large-scale capitalists, some of whom were helping to finance it. [pp. 381-382]

I draw no general but at least two minor conclusions and questions from this story. First, perhaps it was not necessarily reparations alone that broke Germany’s spirit and drove its people to desire revenge. Had an international financial crisis not been set off by the crash of Wall Street, who is to say that the new terms for payment of reparations would not have been a solution, allowing time, as the international board in The Hague hoped, for the recovery of the postwar (post-WWI, that is) German economy? In addition, note that the National Socialist party, while “socialist” in name, was not a grass-roots workers’ movement but was largely financed by “large-scale capitalists.” The object of their support, of course, was to hold communism at bay.

Long after Thomas Mann and his wife had moved to the U.S. and taken American citizenship, and after World War II finally came to a close, the novelist had this to say about his native country: 

‘There are not two Germanies, a bad one and a good one, but only one, in which the best qualities have been corrupted with diabolical cunning into evil. . . . The evil Germany is the good one in misfortune and guilt, the good Germany perverted and overthrown.’

Hayman, his biographer, notes Mann’s undying resentment over what Germany had allowed itself — and been allowed by others — to become: 

His biggest grudge against humanity was that the civilized countries hadn’t merely failed to scotch the growth of Nazism but had encouraged it. ‘My resentment about this I shall take with me to the grave.’

Our reading circle, initiated back in 20xx to read and study James Joyce’s Ulysses together, is meeting soon to discuss Mann’s The Magic Mountain — hardly a book to be absorbed on first reading or adequately considered in a single evening’s conversation, but 2018 is running out, so we’ll do what we can now and maybe come back to Mann later. He is a fascinating writer, not only for his novels but also for the way he wrote (longhand, about a page and a half a day), the time he spent on a work (The Magic Mountain was begun before World War I and not finished and published until 1924), and the way his beliefs and commitments altered with the passage of time and events in Europe. A “reactionary” in the First War, a man who declared he “hated democracy,” he came around to working for the survival of democracy and freedom and doing all he could to support refugees from the nightmare of Hitler’s Germany. Initially, worried that his novels might be banned in Germany and that he might lose his German citizenship (fears that were, unsurprisingly, eventually realized), he hesitated for a long time to speak out against the Nazis. What to say, when to speak, and how -- these were questions that tormented him. He finally made a public statement against Hitler after six years of living “in exile,” and his biographer comments, “A braver man than Thomas might have come out into the open sooner, but Hesse never came out.” 

The Magic Mountain, however, begun before the First World War, was finished and published in 1926, some time before the rise of Hitler. The Magic Mountain is the first work of Thomas Mann’s that I have ever read, and coming to it with little idea of what I would find, I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud in later chapters, even given some of the book's heavy themes of death, decay, and corruption. When you look at a portrait of Mann, he hardly looks like a humorist (and I don’t mean to suggest that he was some kind of German Mark Twain — hardly!), but he found much in human life and civilization ridiculous. When spiritualism overtakes the residents of the Sanitorium Berghof, for example, or when the charismatic Dutchman Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn (modeled in part, at least physically, on the author’s friend Gerhart Hauptman) holds forth at a picnic by a thundering waterfall, declaiming and gesturing to an audience that can’t hear a word he is saying, a reader feels that Thomas Mann was having a wonderful time poking fun. If you’re a traveler, you may be interested in this New Yorker piece about other travelers making a pilgrimage to find the setting of the novel.

All in all, I’m very glad to have read this novel by Thomas Mann and expect to take his advice and read it a second time. It also occurs to me to mention, in light of current world events, that Mann and his German-Jewish wife were immigrants to the United States. 

The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann: A Biography

by Ronald Hayman

NY: Scribner, 1995

Book Review: WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, SISTER?

My books in Arizona

My reading year started off slowly in January. All a-flutter over a trip to the Yucatan with an old friend, to be followed by the cross-country trek with Artist and dog to our winter quarters in the high desert, I could hardly concentrate on books and think I only read the first three on my “Books Read 2018” list that month. Even once we were here in Arizona, all the business of getting settled in and reacquainted with our surroundings and meeting new neighbors and, in my case, studying Spanish meant that it was quite a while before I could settle down to books. 

As it has turned out, much of my reading this winter and early spring has been history and economics (though that fat volume of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations got shoved aside rather abruptly by more reading I found compelling in the moment) — the world, the Southwest, and Mexico. And now, for a couple of days this past week, I found myself completely immersed in a different side of the European World War II experience, thanks to Dennis J. Turner’s What Did You Do in the War, Sister? How Catholic Nuns in Belgium Defied and Deceived the Nazis in World War Two. 

Book in focus

Dennis Turner, professor of law at the University of Dayton in Ohio, is a summer resident of Leelanau County, where he and I met (no surprise!) at Dog Ears Books. Lately we have had quite a bit of e-mail correspondence about his book. The subject intrigued me, and equally intriguing was Turner’s approach to writing the story. 

Beginning with a wealth of source material, including letters and journals written by a group of nuns in Nazi-occupied Belgium, the author made the decision to create a fictional nun to serve as his narrator and then wove together various strands of history — troop movements, bombings, strictures of wartime civilian life and in the life of different religious orders — to show the war in Belgium and France through the eyes of his fictional main character, a young American nun from Ohio, sent by her order shortly before the war began to a convent and girls’ school in Belgium.

This is one book that compels the reading of every page, including sections preceding and following the main story. Turner begins by giving a timeline of events beginning in 1932 and 1945, an extremely helpful historical review. The preface then tells his own personal story — his initial introduction to the Belgian nuns’ story, his own experiences with Catholic education, the atheism he now espouses, his role on the faculty of a Catholic university — as well as background on the particular order of nuns whose experiences inspired his book. His acknowledgements section (“Author’s Reflections”) serves in part as a continuation of the preface, his expressions there truly reflective and grateful for experiences that made his book possible and indicative of learning that, while it did not convert him, enlarged his perspective on religion.

Of course, it is the story that is primary. We first meet Sister Christina in December 1944. The town of St. Hubert and the nuns of Our Lady of Namur had thought the Nazi occupation was over when American soldiers arrived in September, but now they are enduring a second occupation by German troops. Sister Christina recounts her struggle with fear of death, likening it to that experienced by a soldier in battle. Her religious training had schooled her in acceptance, and she had done well in difficult circumstances for several years; however, when she is wounded and a fellow nun beside her killed in a bombing raid, she is gripped by fear. Not wanting the  bravery of the Sisters of Our Lady to be forgotten, should they not survive the war, Sister Christina resolves to write the story of their wartime life and activities, relying on the detailed diary she had always kept. 

Sister Christina speaks German as well as French and, as an American, is a native English speaker, so her linguistic abilities repeatedly make her a logical choice for special responsibilities. When the nuns become active involved in the Resistance, for instance, and men claiming to be downed American pilots come to the convent seeking shelter, it is Sister Christina who is asked to determine whether they are genuine Americans or German imposters. Here she faces a moral dilemma she never expected would be hers in a life of strict obedience, since judging a man to be an imposter meant sending him to certain death.

The convent had not prepared me for these kinds of choices. If any decisions needed to be made, my Sister Superior made them. I naively assumed that if I were somehow given the power of choice, it would simply be a matter of choosing the obvious good and rejecting the obvious evil. The options were black and white, like our habits. Thus, it was a distressing surprise to discover that having freedom of choice drops you into a world of moral ambiguity. Evil may be wrapped in goodness, and good may have evil buried inside.  

… Of course, I might let Sister Ursula carry the entire moral burden of choice. I could escape responsibility by claiming that … I was just obeying Sister Ursula’s orders. I am sure, however, such a rationalization would not have eased my troubled conscience much.

The nuns sheltered and concealed many kinds of fugitives behind their walls. Some were other Resistance fighters, others American pilots shot down by German guns.

In the fall of 1941, persecution of the Jews increased. As a result, Sister Ursula quickly agreed with [Father] Cyril’s request to give refuge to Jews. 

In addition to those Jews literally hidden in the convent, there were Jewish girls “hidden in plain sight” as regular Catholic students of the nuns’ school. These girls were given Christian-sounding names and taught basic prayers and responses. They had to eat whatever was served, including non-kosher pork; they were to speak only French at all times; and their identities were to be kept hidden even from one another. They were not, however, to be baptized or in any way pressured to convert, and a complicated system was developed whereby the Jewish students lined up to receive communion were given an unconsecrated wafer from a secret portion of the ciborium. Their own religion was respected at the same time that they were disguised as Catholic students.

We had built a delicate house of cards based on complete silence, and it would entirely collapse if the Abwehr heard we were knowingly sheltering even one Jewish girl. A mere rumor could trigger a full-scale invasion of the convent and school by Abwehr agents. 

Sister Christina thought when initially sent to Belgium that she would remain in the one sheltered convent, but war shattered that expectation. Neither German nor American bombs spared civilians or those in religious orders. Villages, homes, farms, churches, and convents were equally at risk. (Sister Christina says that she and the others, irrationally, did not have the same fear of American bombs as they did of the Germans, because they realized the Americans were there to liberate them from Nazi occupation.) When their convent home is destroyed, the sisters have to take to the road with other refugees, and throughout the story they are given refuge as often as they give refuge to others.

Her own role is one of increasing complexity, as Sister Christina must wear different masks in the fulfillment of her wartime duties. Her impassive nun’s face at times had to be replaced by a shy, coy flirtatiousness designed to stall German officers so that resident refugees would have time to hide before a search of the convent. With men coming as downed pilots, in order to determine their authenticity she had to set aside silent reserve to engage in lively conversation about American life. And occasionally with stubborn bureaucrats or soldiers it was necessary for her to raise her voice and scold, as if bringing unruly schoolboys to order. 

In the reality of life in occupied Belgium, for everyone concerned, fear alternates with hope, doubt with certainty, and the relief of liberation with the return of occupying forces, occupiers more desperate than ever as their cause becomes more hopeless. At one point the cellar of the convent (serving as bomb shelter) is divided into sections for housing German soldiers, Belgian nuns, and wounded American soldiers who are technical prisoners-of-war. It is a complicated time, and when Sister Christina sees the extreme youth of German boy soldiers she can’t help feeling sorry for them, realizing that “he and his generation would pay the bitter price” for the indoctrination to which they had been subjected. 

While the author carefully notes each instance in the story where he changed or fabricated an event or a conversation, the illusion of reality will not be disturbed for any but the most hidebound literal readers. To read, after all, is frequently to enter into the life of fictional characters. Moreover, not only the background but the majority of facts in this story are documented, making the fictional narrator perfectly believable.

I will bestocking Dennis Turner’s book this summer in my Northport bookstore and hope to have the author on hand at least once to meet a local reading public I know will be appreciative of his efforts and the results. What Did You Do in the War, Sister? is a book that will have have broad appeal and broaden anyone’s historical knowledge of World War II with its page-turning story.

We shall return -- in mid-May!

"I Forget Just Why"

Literature is the memory of humanity. Anyone who writes remembers, and anyone who reads takes part in those experiences. 

 Books can be reprinted. The fact is, there are archival copies of books. 

 Not of people. 

 -      Hans Keilson, in the Afterword to a 1984 reprint edition of his autobiographical novel, Life Goes On

Leben geht weiter (Life Goes On) was published in Germany in 1933 by S. Fischer Verlag and was the last debut by a Jewish writer from that publisher before the German government banned the book in 1934.

An autobiographical novel, Life Goes On is not an account of large political movements or dramatic military events but a portrait of one ordinary family’s life between the two World Wars. Herr Seldersen, proprietor of a modest clothing store, lives above the shop with his wife and son, Albrecht. (An older daughter has finished school and works in Berlin.) He is a decorated veteran of the First World War who came home from the war alive and made his living as a traveling salesman until he saved enough to open his own store. Now in his fifties, as the story opens, he wants nothing more than to continue working for a few more years before retirement.

But Germany’s economic climate between the wars was disastrous. First hyper-inflation, then government deflationary policies, on top of war losses, reparations debts, and a world-wide Great Depression sent unemployment skyrocketing. Early in the novel, a factory on the edge of town burns to the ground.

That night, around two hundred workers lost their jobs and would stay unemployed for a long time. The owner took the insurance money and moved on. People said that the fire had not come at an inconvenient time for him; he was going to have to cut back the size of his business in the foreseeable future anyway, it wasn’t making enough of a profit.

The merchant realizes the workers who have lost their jobs will not be the only ones to suffer. No one will remain untouched.

...Nothing that ever happened had consequences limited to the event itself—everything was linked by fate, one way or another, and in the end no one could escape their share of responsibility for the whole.

We see events in the town through the eyes of both the father and the son. As customers grow fewer and fewer, with more of them buying on credit and unable to make payments, the Seldersens try to keep their financial worries from the boy as long as possible. He, the son, goes to Berlin to study at the university largely because there is nothing else for him to do, but once there he must make money to cover his expenses and to send home to his parents. He becomes a musician for hire and, of necessity, neglects his studies.

The story’s proceeds at an agonizing pace. As Selderson becomes ever more desperate to make ends meet, each day brings new trials and burdens. He buys stock on credit, borrows money to pay his bills, and is crushed by a combination of interest payments and absence of paying customers until, in the end, unable to avoid bankruptcy, he is snatched back from the cliff-edge of suicide by his wife. At last they move to Berlin to live with their son, having lost everything.

Here is the Translator’s Note that follows the main text:

Shortly before Hans Keilson’s death in 2011, I corresponded with him about the end of the novel. The last scene seems strangely like a Nazi rally, but surely he intended it to be a Communist march or other left-wing demonstration? He told me that the publisher (in 1933) had made him change the ending of the book, hoping to avoid political difficulties. Originally, Albrecht and his father had explicitly raised their fists in the Communist salute, not their hands in a Nazi salute. In the published version, it was left ambiguous.

(The hope of avoiding political difficulties was dashed when the book was banned in the year following its publication.)

Another story line concerns Albrecht’s close friend, Fritz Fiedler. The Fiedler family were working-class, and Fritz would have been content to continue in that tradition, but there is no work for him. He is prepared to venture out in the larger world and take his chances, but even far from home, whatever work he manages to find is only temporary. His last hope, emigration to America, proves a dead end: the Americans have their own unemployment and have nothing to offer a would-be immigrant, who returns home with no hope of a future. Fritz’s suicide is a turning point in the way Albrecht sees his own place in the world.

Keilson himself emigrated to the Netherlands following the banning of his novel, and his daughter was born there while he was in hiding from the Nazis. He completed the work for his Ph.D. in medicine 45 years after beginning his studies in Berlin (told then that, as a Jew, he would not be permitted to practice medicine) and pursued a career in child psychology, publishing a monograph on “Sequential Traumatization in Children,” based on his work with Jewish war orphans. “My work as a psychoanalyst,” he said once, “is more important than my writing.” He did, however, write a second autobiographical novel, published in 1959, and also many poems.

Keilson’s parents, the merchant couple in Life Goes On, also emigrated to the Netherlands, but they were arrested and died in Auschwitz. At the age of 100, he still felt guilt over not having been able to save his parents' lives.

Recently my sister woke up with poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay in her head. The last lines (see complete text here) are 

Life must go on;

I forget just why.

Though his best friend killed himself, he was forced out of the country he considered his homeland, and his parents were murdered, Hans Keilson’s life went on. Why? Perhaps so he could help the orphans in Amsterdam, so that he might have two daughters and three grandchildren, and preserve memory for all of us, through his contributions to literature, of a world we never want to see again.

How's Your Hungarian?

All I can tell of this book’s contents by looking into it comes from the photographs and other illustrations. On the title page, for instance, there is the word “Natura,” which is clearly the publisher’s name but also gives a clue to what’s inside the book. And sure enough, in the many pages following there are photographs of forests and trees, mountains and fields, wildflowers and fish, even microscopic aquatic fauna.

Below is a graphic representation I take to show different microclimates at varying altitudes, but there are also photographs of human dwellings and other buildings.

(I'll spare you the maps and other graphs.) Searching online, I find that this Hungarian edition (1981) is available in six libraries around the world, and I can find information on Lake Balaton, claimed to be “Europe’s largest freshwater lake.” That linked site provided hints to more of what I found in the book, e.g., the medieval ruins. Or do these ruins look even older than the Middle Ages? Prehistoric, perhaps? The answer lies open in the text, but I cannot tell what I’m looking at. I see cultivation of grapes, fishing, logging, charming thatched cottages and old-fashioned farm wagons. But how much of this is historical, and how much is current?

It was not myself-as-reader but myself-as-avid bookseller who snatched up this book! Now, to find a bookstore customer who reads Hungarian!

Selling a book in German on -- I’m guessing -- housekeeping will probably be easier. Here it is:

Wouldn’t Neuzeit be “new times," implying modern? I’m sure the maid’s uniform was modern when the book was first published, but the maid and the little table set up for coffee (not tea: this is Germany, not England) look quite early 20^th century to me. I would do better picking out a word here and there except that they are all in the old script. Ah, but here’s part of the title illuminated by an online search: Domestic Science!

Now if anyone is still with me – or has impatiently scrolled down to see if there was going to be a point to all this – that person might be asking, Is she out of her mind? So here is the place where I remind that reader that I have been a bookseller for over 21 years. Surely now you see that your question is rhetorical, don’t you?

Book Review: A WORLD ELSEWHERE

A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany, by Sigrid MacRae

NY: Viking, 2014

Someone at Viking made quite an understatement in writing the tip sheet accompanying the review copy of this book: “This shows the side of the [sic] WWII rarely seen.” A World Elsewhere is much more complicated than a story of “ordinary, decent people.” I was somewhat prepared for the author’s mother’s story, having hosted in 2006 another author whose family had survived repeated escapes in the same era--from Russia to Estonia to Poland to East Germany, West Germany, and finally to the United States.

Following the event with Sigrid von Bremen, I also heard another friend’s history of a complicated and harrowing World War II escape from the Germany of her birthplace, a third’s story of parents who survived both exile in Siberia and imprisonment in concentration camps, and a fourth’s telling me of many family members who died in those camps. But all of these were “decent, ordinary people.”

Sigrid MacRae’s parents’ story is unique in my own reading experience in two ways: first, that her mother was American (the other stories of fleeing Germany were all of Europeans), and second, that her father was a German officer.

In her prologue, MacRae tells of being given by her 85-year-old mother a box of her father’s letters, a box she was “reluctant” to open.

Opening the box—resurrecting him—would mean finding not only the man who became my father, but also the man responsible for the “Nazi!” a first-grade classmate had yelled at me as a six-year-old, newly arrived in the States from Germany. I didn’t know then what that was, but whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t good. The taunt stayed with me. It was thrown at me in many other guises, and eventually I blamed my father.

Eventually, after finally reading the letters, she undertakes extensive family and wartime research to be able to write her parents’ story. For the record, I'll note here that her father, while he   became an officer, was not a Nazi and not a member of the S.S. When he died, he was in the infantry, and most of his "action" consisted of marching through countries (France, Russia) Hitler hoped to conquer.

The book begins with the unlikely event of her parents’ first meeting and then, as MacRae tells of their getting to know one another, gives the very different backgrounds of her mother and father, Aimée and Heinrich. Aimée had lost her mother when only three years old; her father was cold and distant, her older brother anything but a protector. As if this weren’t enough, the girl spent years in a body cast to correct scoliosis. Thus Aimée’s girlhood and adolescence were spent in relative isolation, her education haphazard. Heinrich, by contrast, came from a large, close Baltic German family attached, before the Revolution, to the Russian court. He was confident, charming, and worldly in the best sense of the word. The two fell deeply in love, and when Aimée returned to Europe to marry him after a trip home, she expected to spend the rest of her life in Europe. When asked when she would be returning home, she replied confidently and emphatically, “Never!” For her, America was her father’s cold home, Europe her husband’s warm family.

A typical young married story begins: Heinrich immerses himself in studies, and Aimée begins having babies. They have the troubles and worries of any young couple trying to establish family and career but fewer financial worries than most, thanks to quarterly checks from Aimée’s trust fund in America.

But this is Germany between two world wars, and so along come unemployment, inflation, a weak government, and, eventually, the coming to power of Hitler. Heinrich’s family members and friends were not well disposed toward Hitler but did not imagine he would rise very high, be in power for long, or prove a great danger. That he was not a Communist something they saw in his favor.

At this point in the book a reader with historical hindsight begins to feel a chill.

Somehow the subtitle, An American Woman in Wartime Germany, did not prepare me to follow Aimée’s husband into occupied France as an infantry lieutenant. Imagining herself in her father’s shoes (helped by the letters he wrote to her mother during this time), MacRae paints a picture of French peasants clinging to their traditional hatred of the English and philosophically accepting the German invaders—until, too late, they realized that the Germans were making war not only against the English but also against the people of France. Eventually Heinrich, once a refugee himself when his family had to flee St. Petersburg for their estate in Baltic Germany, was put in charge of a POW camp and charged with helping refugees return home. He writes to his wife, “The misery in which these unhappy refugees live—here, there, wherever they find a place—is terrible.” Mostly, however, rather than dwelling on the ugliness of war, Heinrich writes home of the beauty of the French countryside and of his love for his family.

Almost all of my own European experience, as well as what foreign language competence I possess, relates to France, and the same was true for my father, a veteran of World War II—all the more reason I found myself in strange territory, accompanying, as it were, the German Army as it invaded France. It seems unlikely that the author’s father had any kind of vision of Germany taking over the world. Still, knowing what was to come in the Occupation, I could not take his letters at face value.

Then in June of 1941 came Operation Barbarossa, a three-pronged German military push into Russia. Despite what had become of Napoleon and his army in 1812,

...Hitler was confident, claiming that he had only to “kick in the door” and the behemoth would crumble. Heinrich was with Army Group Center, the largest of the three prongs of the operation, meant to deliver a lightning strike and bring the quick victory Hitler predicted would be his before fall.

Heinrich can’t help thinking that a German victory in western Russia might enable him to return to his happy childhood place, the family estate in Ottenhof. Odds seemed to favor them in that the disparate peoples of Russia had never become unified under Soviet rule, and the “defenders of the Motherland were hungry and hollow-eyed,” often throwing down their weapons “in panic and exhaustion.”

Like his friend and fellow officer, Alexis von Roene, Heinrich had little sympathy with Hitler’s values and goals. But he was a Baltic German, with strong Russian roots.

The Russians had been set up on the bank of the Dnieper in 1812 just as they were now. If an awareness that this time Heinrich was in the role of invader, not defender, cast any shadow or brought a frisson of unease, it was quickly banished. He mentions no burned villages, no ruthless brutality. He was no alien invader; he was returning to land defended over the years by forefathers. This was a liberation, a return home.

He was killed at Mogilev on July 23, 1941. From that date forward his children, including the baby girl who never had a chance to know her father, had to depend on the resourcefulness and ingenuity of their American mother to preserve their lives and insure their future, and the remainder of the book is faithful to its subtitle.

From an isolated girlhood, interrupted by surgeries and immobilizations in a body cast and followed by an unhappy boarding school experience, the widow Aimée, American-born mother of six children born in Germany to a German father, finds within herself enormous reserves of strength because – she had no choice. Residents had been forbidden to leave East Prussia, but the roads were seething with fleeing refugees, Berlin was under siege, and if the family stayed put as ordered, Aimée’s oldest son, 16-year-old Friedrich, would be taken into a German army desperate for men.

She gave each child a small chamois bag with [her brother’s] Chicago address to hang around their necks. Putting any hope at all into such a fragile vessel seemed absurd, but she felt compelled to do it. They were headed into the unknown, and the thought of being separated in the maelstrom ahead was terrifying.

They had a wagon and a horse. They had, for a while, potatoes. At last they reach British lines, where Aimée persuades a British officer not to send them back into Russian-held territory.

After a series of refugee and displaced person camps, the family at last settles “permanently” in the traditional farming village of Grosseelheim, where the doctor friend who has attached herself to the family hopes to set up in practice, but the villagers and farmers are poor and cannot afford much doctoring. Then the doctor herself dies of cancer, and the family turns to relatives in America, hoping to emigrate.

Once safe in New England the family faces new struggles: an abandoned farmhouse that needs almost everything essential to it replaced; a deportation threat; the necessity of moving from a house they thought they would never leave when the property is condemned for expansion of a U.S. Navy airfield. But of course we know, from the beginning of the book, that mother and children flourish in America.

For me, it was not so much the story of  “an American woman in wartime Germany” that held me spellbound but the individual stories of young Aimée and Friedrich, their love story, and the unsettling view of the invasion of France through the eyes of a German officer, along with the grit and determination Aimée demonstrated in building a new life in America.

A World Elsewhere is beautifully but simply written. Much of the words on the page come directly from letters, the author allowing her parents to speak for themselves. The accumulated facts of the story are haunting, simply by being true. I doubt that very many postwar American women have ever imagined themselves wives of German officers. In hindsight and from an American perspective, such a vision is unthinkable. And yet, here were two young people, previously tossed about by life, who fell in love and did what lovers all over the world have always done--they married and began a family—little realizing the tossing about that lay ahead of them in the future.

The author writes in her epilogue that researching this book

...taught me that there is not one history, but many; that context is everything, and life is far more complex than we ever imagine, especially when history writ large intervenes. I found that despite the stiff-armed Nazi salutes and gutteral “Achtungs” that came my way, I was not the devil’s spawn after all, just the product of two people in a particular time and place, enmeshed in circumstance, their hopes upended.

MacRae’s parents’ story is not one familiar from hundreds of others from World War II, but the author conveys its truth and poignancy in such a way that the lives of Heinrich and Aimée will remain with readers long after the book has been closed.