Transcripts For CSPAN3 Writing World War II Fiction 20240711

Im next on American History tv. Author Donald Miller interviews Jessica Shattuck about her novel, the women in the castle. She explains how her familys connection to nazi germany influenced her work, and how her research informed her understanding of german citizens during world war ii. This when our top was part of a three Day Conference hosted by the National World War Ii Museum in new orleans. So, welcome back. This next session is a unique one for our conference. For those of you who come here regularly, you are used to seeing the best and brightest minds in the field of world war ii history. This normally means the best selling authors of history books, leading professors and documentarians. But when we were planning this years program, we decided to mix it up by inviting a novelist, and only the second one that weve hosted in the conferences for the entire time that weve been doing these. Don miller, authors of masters at the air is also one of our longest standing advisers and counselors. Hes a perennial conference presents. Hes also, like we heard from Rick Atkinson this morning, hes also looking into a another time period in our history and will soon be coming out this october with vicksburg, grants campaign that broke the confederacy. When planning, the committee decided on this idea for a session. Don told us immediately that we had to invite Jessica Shattuck, author of women in the castle. So, to hear about jessicas book and the differences and similarities in researching and writing these two genres, please join me in welcoming don miller and Jessica Shattuck. Okay, we are going to get started. Its good to see everyone although i cant see you with these lights. Seeing people who take the trip with us and the regulars at the conference and the newcomers as well. We have a special treat today. Not just the fact that we have our second novelist, but we have an extraordinary novelist who i literally tripped over her, not bodily, but her book. I was at heathrow airport. My covers a little different than your seeing, as the british addition. I was looking for something to read and read it on the plane. When i got home, i was taken away. This is a sweeping beautifully written historical novel in the highest sense, and that it has verisimilitude, real feel for the subject, its based deeply on the best recent german scholarship, christopher browning, star gore, diaries, victor clamp or, you name it. But its not clunky. It isnt pedantry. Jessica is, first of all, a plotter. She writes in fashion the believes in storytelling. She the book is a wonderful meld of storytelling and illuminating history. Its about the windows you know, the museum has never made a mistake by the way, nor have i, and i dont know about jessica, but for some reason her bio didnt get into the program. I dont know. It must have been a printer, it could have been anyone at the museum, no one has taken responsibility. But i ought to say this, shes from brooklyn, massachusetts. Shes the mother of three. This is her third novel. There is a fourth one bubbling up there in her big brain. She has a degree from harvard and an mfa from columbia. She has written i think a real Tour De Force here. But i was drawn to in this book is its about three women who are the windows of the plotters and conspirators who went after antler in july, 1944, and almost assassinated him. But its not about that, they sassy nation, its about the lives of the women in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. And so it presents itself as a rod and novel about resistance. These are the ones who made the choice and decided to risk their own lives to save their country. They are heroic figures. One of the figures is the central figure in the novel. Her name is mariana, and shes been part of this plot with her husband from 1938 on. She has pledged to her best friend and her husband that she will take care of, they all know they are going to get killed. They have a real inclination that this isnt going to work. So shes going to take care and go after and find the windows and see that they are hidden and taken care of. And she does. She collects two of them in this crumbling the very uncastle and theyre the novel begins. So im ready for a novel about resistance, and im getting a novel thats more about complicity than resistance. Im thinking of camus and sartre, existentialism and about choice. If you decide to do nothing against a regime that is maniacal, that is choice. You are in a sense an enabler. We are made by our choices. That is who we are. That is what this book is about. Its also a book that does not condemn. Its a book about understanding. I thought that was very subtly done as well. And yet, magically, jessica manages to intermix this with some fine history. You learn about displaced persons camps and refugee camps. You learn about german lager camps for the german youth. That was one of the chapters that had the most poll for me. What is the pull of hitler . Not hitler the monster, but hitler as they see him, the idealist. People join this cause because they believe in a different kind of germany. They believe in the future. You get a sense of the poll of fascism. You get refugees in berlin with the red army there. You get people under the bombs. You have this wonderful panoramic view of germany, 1945 to 1946, and it bounces back and forth. Then as im reading this, and im going to turn this over to jessica, as im reading this i thought, i read this piece in the New York Times that she wrote. It went viral on the net. Its called i love my grandmother, but she was a nazi. March 24, 2017. I think, yeah, this is the woman who wrote that terrific piece and now im reading her novel. So its based upon, it has is foundation in some real history, so family history. Jessica, if you could start us with that and how you cant write this novel. Yeah. So, thank you don for inviting me to come here at the world War Ii Museum. Im honored to be the second representative of my genre up here. We have no idea who the first one was. Hopefully he was not egged off the stage. Im really honored to be here. This book took me over seven years to research and right. So to get the call and the included in a group of people who are such experts in these areas that i spent a lot of time researching means a lot to me. I love hearing the conversations and having the conversations about that. Can you all hear me all right . Okay. So i will talk about how i came to write this book, which donald has explained very beautifully here. I love when other people tell what my book is about so i dont have to give my three minute elevator pitch that i have given several thousand times. How i came to this is it comes from a very personal place for me. Im have chairman. I grew up with a very conflicted sense of my german identity. My mother was born in 1943 and grew up in a farm, a small farm in west failure who which had been in her family for over 500 years. She came to america at the age of 19 and never went back. She became an american citizen as fast as she could. She did not even go back to visit her parents for the first six years that she was. Here through her story and her attitudes, i absorbed a lot of what i think was a strong sense of shame that she had about being from germany. She had a lot of anger at the country of her birth and also at her own parents who had been what i grew up thinking of as ordinary germans. Which they were, but when i began to write this book and as i got older, even before i started writing this book, i could put a finer and finer point on what it meant to be ordinary germans in their case because the vast swath of the variety of attitudes and experiences that that term encompasses is huge. So i think that have been kind of growing up with that conflicted feeling, and also with a strong awareness of the holocaust and world war ii, i cant remember a time in my life that i did not know with the holocaust was and that i did not understand the germany had started world war ii. Those things kind of percolated inmate for a long time. When i was 15, my mother passed away suddenly and i never had the chance in an adult way to have conversations with her about what it meant to grow up in her house and what kinds of conversations she had had with her parents and what kinds of questions she had put to them. What they had said. So, in her place, the person i had to turn to who could help me try to understand this was my grandmother. We i spent a good deal of time, when i was in college actually for my undergraduate thesis, interviewing my grandmother about her experience of wind world war ii and what she had been up to. How she had gotten to where she got and those stories spent a lot of time turning over in my mind. When it became time to sit down and actually write the book that i knew i always wanted to write at some point, they came back to the surface. When did you first learn that your grandparents were not just nazis, but that they ran a youth camp . Yeah, so that was one of the things. I had always known they were ordinary germans. Unlike many germans of my generation, i sort of said if people would say, what does that mean . Where your grandparents nazis . I would say, no, they were just ordinary. My grandfather fought and he was in the army he was in the wermacht. As many of you know, the wermacht encompasses that giant swath of experience and its not in any way exonerating to have fought in the wermacht. You couldve done 100 different things. When i spend that summer on the farm interviewing my grandmother and talking to her about that time, she kind of took me back to the beginning. It was very important to her to try to explain herself and my grandfather in a way that i think was somewhat rare for germans of her generation. That she really wanted to talk about this. And one of the things she wanted to explain was that they had come to the nazi party and had joined it in 1937. This was, in her words, as idealists. Which obviously has a perverse sound to it. But she said you have to understand, this was during the clinton era and i have been talking a lot about how i was interested in joining the National Service program that clinton was putting into place as a college student. She said, what we wanted to do was a lot like our National Service program. I said, no, no, no. Really, it was not like the National Service program. What her point was i think, what she was drawn to was this kind of youth work that was idealistic in her mind because it was leading a group of teenagers who had to spend a year on the land. It originated in this perversely kind of what my grandmother was drawn to was sort of the egalitarian nature of it. It would take the children of hamburg dock workers and the children of aristocrats and the inner city children and rural children in everyone whos going to live together on these camps on the land and volunteer to local farmers and learn about agriculture it that way. Underlying this, what my grandmother did not talk about but what i learned more about in my research, was that this played very much into hitlers ideology of uniting the german race with the german soil and returning germany to its agricultural might. That, of course, also connects to the. When you talk about that, whats really froze me for a second was her emphasis on emphasis, the character, on not just solidarity but cooperation. Also a socialist take kind of this was a camp to break down class distinctions. Yes. Coming a little bit about that. That was definitely her picture of it. According to her story, it was her lived reality in those early years. You know, this began before the war. And of course, as soon as the war was happening, this program got shrunk down. By the end of the war, it basically did not exist anymore. It had basically morphed into much darker programs that were made to feed young men into the ss. There were also programs to arm the presence of the east, to basically make them into a kind of militia, and they were sending young men out there to be educated, but also to be fodder for the war. That part my grandmother was never a part of. Her dealings and my grandfathers were done in 1939 i think was there last year there. But it was enough. Her point i think in talking about this, and what struck me so much about this, was her desire to explain to me how wet had drawn her into this movement that became synonymous with evil was something that wasnt it wasnt she was drawn to it because of antisemitism, although im sure that was the status quo of life there then, so i dont think she wouldnt argue that there was not antisemitism in it. But it did not come from a place of hate, it came from a place of all these other things. The cooperation, the egalitarian is in, breaking down class divisions. I think her idea here was not to excuse yourself, but to explain the danger of following one narrative and not necessarily lifting up and seeing what is on the other side. So she was looking for forgiveness . I never thought she was looking for forgiveness. I thought she was looking to be understood, and i felt she was looking to tell a cautionary tale about what i took away from that was crossexamine your narratives. Cross examine the narratives that are fed to you. Make sure you are playing devils advocate at every turn. Yeah. When you are asking her questions from the article, how did you not know what hitler was up to . You listen to the radio. You saw the newspapers. Jews are pulled from the community. What were explanations for that . Yeah. Well, i think that for her shoes, she was like many people who World Germans of that time we insisted they never saw any of that. I never knew any jews. I did not press her as hard as i would have now when i was writing this book on that. I dont think thats entirely possible. I think she wanted to believe that herself and she wanted me to believe that. But i think there were too many intimations of things. It is true that the Jewish Population of germany at the beginning of world war ii was under 1 . There were very few choose living in mary many rural communities, but still. But still. There are ways where if you were awake and alert, you would have seen the science and seen what was unfolding around you. I think that brings me to another part of what i really try to write about in my book and trying to understand and think about the german experience of that time, and even more so, the german experience in the immediate aftermath of that time when people were reckoning with themselves. It was kind of how much people saw and knew what they wanted to. For those of you who speak german, i come back to the idea that in the german language, there are two words for knowledge, for knowing. There is wissen, and any direct derivative of that witches wisdom. And another which is being acquainted with facts. When you know someone, its in the kennen family. When you talk about understanding something, its wissen. I think its telling about, not just in germany, but in all cultures, we have levels of what we know and what we allow ourselves to know. Within that scale, we include turning a blind eye versus being curious. And lifting up those stones and looking what is under them. I kept thinking when we were reading this. Would we have allowed this to happen . Would i have allowed this to happen . Would you have allowed this to happen . Did you think about that . I thought about it a lot. One thing about studying and writing about civilians at that time, and ordinary germans, is how totally engaged they were in their own direct lives and what was immediately in front of them. I think about how i can be completely consumed by my media live and getting my three kids to school and walking the dog and paying the bills and what am i going to make for dinner tonight. This is in a peace time when theres no great duress in my life right now, knock on wood, and i also have access to an enormous amount of news from different sources and social media. Then i put myself back in that time and there was a war unfolding, so all of the questions of how am i going to feed my children dinner, where am i going to go since my parchment got bombed, were so much more pressing. There was so much less access to a diversity of new sources that it seems that, of course, i can imagine how people were completely wrapped up in their own small world and didnt want to see what was outside of that. One of the things, one of the pieces i kept coming back to and thinking about that question was one of the sort of tells that i think would have been hardest to overlook was the level of slave labor in germany at that time. That factors into my book. Somewhat heavily, but the level of conscripted workers that were so many, and small towns, working agriculture. In big cities working in the industry. These people were walking through town and being marched to their worksites and that, to me, is a little bit of a, how could you not see that . And how could you suddenly accept that . Even your resist are, marianne, is the leader of the resist ors, she has a farmworker. Hes given some polish workers and displaced persons and refugees. He whips them and he reads nazi propaganda and believes they are less than human. Her and her husband allow it. Yeah. They are members of the resistance, yet they have this going on on their estate and this comes back and haunts her afterwards. But during the war, and this was very much called i read so many memories of that time of resistance and other ordinary germans, but this was a theme that i came across and several resist ares morris talking about looking back and realizing on this level i was doing but i could to fight and to resist, but on this level what could i do . And then kind of asking themselves that. What could i have done . We talked about it before, not here, but you made very interesting observation. Germany, of course, has done an awful lot to can gauge its students in the monstrous history of the reich. We ran into some students on a recent trip who were in the holocaust section of the imperial war museum. As much as they had been educated in this, they were stunned by some of the photography and the recreation of the auschwitz killing camp and things like that. You pointed out something that i have found myself in doing research in germany. Despite the museums and the phones and everything else, when you talk to individual germans, they dont want to take it down to the family level. You find that . Yeah, we were discussing this because i found that very interesting and doing my research. I would talk with people of my generation and below, who had very good knowledge and understanding of what germany had done, of all of the facts of world war ii and the holocaust and accepted the burden of responsibility that comes with that as a nation. But yet, i would say what did your grandpa do during the war . The same as i used to say. He was in the wehrmacht. Was he a member of the party . Oh, i dont know. I dont think so. It was interesting to me, including my own cousins who, at one point, they said how much do you know so much more about what their lives were like before the war . You know so much more than we do, and they lived on the other half of the farm. They share the same house. I think actually, there is an answer in that. That when you live so closely to something, its kind of painful to go to that place. I think for many people, there was a different kind of turning a blind eye and not wanting to know. Whereas im american, i live here in america, i identify as half chairman. Ive struggled a lot with what that means, but i have the distance and the separation to be able to go to that place, and i had that in order to be able to ask my grandmother, and my grandfather to an extent although he was much less forthcoming about that time. It afforded me that possibility. I also want to talk about one of the thing. A lot of germans, im surprised at how little they know about the immediate pieces of the post war period. In my book, i write a little bit. I have a character who is a german p. O. W. Who is kept in place and gets moved to a different camp that is in the american sector and then in the french sector. Several of my german readers, including my aunt said, what is this . What are you talking about . Ive never heard of this. Its interesting because so many german man were actually held after the war. I mean, the last german p. O. W. Did not come back from russia until 1956. The english countryside was, at some point, i read some statistic, this could be wrong, i have a bad head for numbers. But i think it was Something Like 25 of the Agricultural Workers in long in england worked german p. O. W. s up until like 1952 or something. Germany still had those dp camps in the 1950. Yes, thats a whole separate thing. The dp camps, somewhere between 12 and 20 million refugees who were housed in germany immediately after the war in these dp camps. But all of this was very much had a direct bearing on the lives of germans at that time. But yet, theres so little study or discussed and i dont know if its out of the trauma of it or out of the shame of if youre grandfather was in a p. O. W. Camp after the war. What did that mean . Nobody wanted to talk about when obama didnt come home from the war, actually, for the extra six months. But its very interesting to me. You break a lot of stereotypes in the book. You go after the cannon of holocaust history. On one side, you have and frank, the martyr, hitler the monster. There is a dichotomous way of teaching german history. My students cannot relate to it because anne frank is two unbelievably heroic to relate to and hitler is to monstrous the evil to relate to. But i think by operating on the edge of the holocaust, getting these ordinary germans in their, then people can understand because they can ask the question, what would i have done. You know, when i first started thinking about writing this book that i knew i wanted to encompass some element of my own understanding of my family is experience of that war. We have not even got into the resist or,s which i can tell you about. But i was looking for other models and other fiction in english that dealt with what i think of as kind of the gray zone around the dark epicenter of world war ii, which is the holocaust. The gray, ordinary area where actually most germans lived. I found very little, and that was part of why i wanted to write this. I felt compelled to go to that place, to try to represent that experience, because of what you are saying. I sometimes wonder if we are a little in danger, at least in the world of world war ii fiction, here in the english language, of continuing to tell the same stories which are on the one hand, as you, said the and frank story or that archetype of the victims story, survivor story, and then over here the kind of slightly voyeuristic inside look at the darkest, ugliest thats how these kids are taught. I Teach High School seminars down here. And thats how they are taught. Thats how it goes. Yeah, and that seems to me very troubling. And neither of those places is there really a mirror that you hold up to yourself. Certainly, hopefully, most of us cannot relate at all to the ss sicko or, who was it that made the lampshades out of human skin, i forget who that was, but that kind of story that we really focus on. And then over here, we can imagine the horror of being a victim and ultimately have also survivors. But they do not relate to our everyday lives, whereas this whole zone here does. So i worry that we are kind of missing a lot of opportunities to learn from that time period. There is a resist or museum in amsterdam that does it beautifully with a door scene. You know, you are jewish, youve lived in this neighborhood for 25 years, and you knock on the door and ask to be taken and hidden, and the person who answers that door can say yes or no, but youve got to remember, and i point this out, if you say yes, suddenly your whole family is pulled into. This they would have never been pulled into it before. Now, right down to your sixyearold child, they are in this. And the dutch are somewhat like us. They are bourgeois. They love to make money. They are capitalist stick. They have democratic traditions. And there you can see. It what would i have done kind of thing. And it there is also a tradition, its interesting. I read about the resistance here, which i will talk about in a minute how i came to that part of this, but i think of it as there are two categories of people. There are the resist or,s and then there are the helpers. Because acts like someone coming and knocking on your door and saying can you hide me and my son in your attic, to respond to that and take that risk was actually a totally different kind of action then to take the kind of action that we were part of an organized resistance in which they were really talking about systemic overhaul and overthrowing hitler. Tell us about that resist or group you met in new york. How i came to this was when i knew all along i wanted to write something that connected to my families experience, i was not sure what my way in was. I needed a foil, i feel like. I grew up in this Apartment Building in new york city and four floors above us who was a woman who was also german, and my mothers age, and had a daughter one month older than me. My mother and this woman met in the elevator and realize they were both chairman, and they became best friends. As it turned, out there backgrounds could not have been more different, because this woman was the daughter of a resist or, and her father had been failed following the failed july 24th plot. I went with this friend of my mothers shortly after he died to her mothers 80th birthday celebration. This was kind of a reunion of windows of the resistance, of sorts. There were many people there who knew each other from that time, very many few were men of that generation, and women, because the women were the survivors. And i was really struck in that time by how different my friends families legacy, how different her relationship to her legacy, her familys legacy was then my own. And the grandfather, the patriarch of that family, had seen the evil of hitler unfolding in realtime and taken courageous action against it, whereas my own grandparents had turned a blind eye or tried not to know and done nothing. So to me, there is a real interesting question in their of whats made it. Why did these people have the courage and is it self interest . You have two types of exposure. Getting back to the choice thing with your characters here. Looking to the profession aristocracy and things like that, they hear of atrocities on the Eastern Front and are horrified by it. Thats actually very close to the Valkyrie Group and whatnot. Then you have at the end, you have these farmers, peasants like your grandparents, and its the end of the war and they are dropping, americans are dropping leaflets with pictures of the camps. And they dont believe them. They think its a lie and propaganda. So one group takes the information, absorbs it and asked the other group, and the desire to just go on with a life and not to be touched by this, not to commit. It is so much more circumstantially driven. You go into this question wanting to uncover what is the character traits that is going to reveal whether you would be the person who takes action or does not. My take away, actually, from reading many of the memoirs and histories of the resistance was, in many cases, there was a simple access to information that they had, partly. And it was somewhat class driven because many of the resistance were aristocrats, and many of them as aristocrats had positions of power in the government and access to a lot more information early on. As soon as they knew what was happening after the conference and it was really and many of them had access to secret documents no one else was going to see, whereas many of the peasants who were living their lives and listening to the radio and whats telling them and trying not to find a new home after their houses bond it didnt have that access, and sure there were rumors, and thats something that i always think about as well. How many rumors came back from the east . You had soldiers who were on the front and the east riding back and saying i saw the most horrible thing. So once a letter like that arrives in the community, how do you ignore that . That starts getting circulated. But i spoke to some about that who said, you know, for one thing, it was easy to dismiss when someones sisters on uncles brother sent this letter and it said this, we already know how much easier that is to dismiss than having access to a secret government document. But its also a question, again, of what you want to choose, how much people wanted to go down that road. You said you didnt get a lot of antisemitism in the camps, but they did teach eugenics. They taught nazi supremacy in the darwinian sense, struggle in the race and everything. So she picks up on this and she bought it. And your character buys it. There is a great scene, and we will go to questions after this. There is a great scene where on, the woman who runs the locker, its many years later and her daughter is talking to her and says how can you believe this stuff. And on you said, well, its like the summer camp you go to. And the person says are you kidding me . A summer camp and nazi youth kept the same thing . So she continues to believe this. Did your grandmother continue to believe this . The sort of eugenics ideas . I should have scraped the surface more with her. Im not sure i wanted to, because i think a lot of that stuff that you absorbed as you are told its how you are brought up, that she had some crazy ideas about things like protein is you need to have certain amounts of egg white protein because otherwise things that probably came from some weird there was a book by a recent german scholar, 800 pages, a series of interviews. Almost everyone this guy interview not too long ago believes exactly the things they believed in the thirties. Yeah. You mean the people that he interviews . Yeah. Some of the teachings, the big ones have been debunked. Protein will lead to a bigger brand and thats why people in Northern Europe have bigger brains than people below you know . Things like that might still permeate. But do you think people like your grandmother deserve to be forgiven . I guess i dont like when it comes down to forgive or not forgive. I dont feel like its up to me to forgive. I feel like its up to the survivors and the victims to forgive. And i also feel like its an unhelpful lens to look through it, because it ends up putting us back in that black and white territory. So i prefer to think of it as, i dont think thats what she was looking for. The marks ian term for a complete understanding, a empathetic, but empathetic and understanding that hopefully, i mean, at some point when i was first writing this book, i was talking with my agent and he said something about if you are going to it was before i wrote the oped. I said i am writing an oped, but i want to know what to say. He said your grandparents were nazis. What do you do with that . And i say god, you are right. I dont have an answer. I guess i cant read the oped, cause i dont know what my answer is. But then i actually thought, well, thats the answer to me. Actually being here and writing the book and talking about this and making these sort of taboo subjects something that we actually can kind of discuss and try to understand and learn from and take away in the way that all of us here have an interest in history because we believe there is so much to be learned from it. To try to learn from it in a less boundary the way, and ive been doing these talks with a friend who is a fiction writer, who is the granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors, and the two of us have done a bunch of talks on the radio and in different formats talking about what what it means to us to come from this place, and then what it means for us to be having a conversation like that. And it has been really, really interesting, because for a lot of people that feels really transgressive. This is your first shot at historical fiction, you have history here, fiction here. There is supposed to be a boundary between them and you are melding the two. Where it is one stop and one and . How did you find the process of writing historical fiction . You had never done it before. I had never done it before and i absolutely loved. It i am sticking with it. My next book is going to be it will have a present day part, but its also historical. I feel like there is a richness. The research itself is so fascinating. And there is a richness that you can bring to any story when you are grounding it in pieces of real history. There is a depth there i think that is harder to achieve when you are looking at the world around you in realtime. Okay. We are going to open this up to the audience. Jeremy, are you around . Questions. All that you choose them. Before we get to questions, first thank you both for an interesting and engaging conversation. The first question will be to the speakers right at the very back. First, i want to thank you very much for talking about this subject. I am kind of at the flip side where i have Holocaust Survivors in my family and i teach history in mississippi where most of my students have never met a jewish person. So i do share my families stories with them. I do think it is important what you talked about, that sort of gray area, because the further away we get from the war and what happened. My students also seem to think that these people were sort of from another planet and were so different and so alien to the way they could be or that we could be, that it is important and i do try to explain to them that germans at that time like your grandparents were not really different then we are. There is that question of what would we do . I also do think the issue of choice, as you mention, that the women that you wrote about is very important because, even though they are fictional characters, they also need to understand that there was a choice in those instances. There were people that made that kind of choice. To recognize and to resist what was happening. So im definitely going to read your book because i do agree with you that there isnt enough literature, whether fiction or nonfiction, on that area where we need to understand that. So thank you very much. Thank you. In the Center Section towards the very back with a question. Thank you for showing that. It was very informative. If you dont mind me asking, were you able to bring yourself to research on your grandfathers wartime experiences . Yes, thats a good question. I was. It was hard to find a lot of information, but i know that he served in the wehrmacht, originally he was part of the takeover of the occupation of paris. He was involved in marching in that direction. Then he was on the Eastern Front for a little while where he was wounded and then sent home. Beyond that, i dont know that much about what he did within that. I have a Research Request in, there are probably a lot of experts here who can help me figure this out faster, but i have a letter in the queue through the german archives, the old red cross administered archives. You can do it online. Im trying to get more. Thats where i found the documentation. My aunt did something that was similar and we got the paper that shows when he and my mother my grandmothers joined in the nazi party. So its an ongoing process. Tell him a little bit about your grandfathers refusal to answer you. Its funny. At some point i listen to my sister, i dont know why i did not press grandpa more when he was alive. How did i let him get off the hook . That i did not ask him more questions. How did i not get more information and stories from him about that time . She turned to me and said, i know why. Because he was mean. , he was a very difficult person, and he was clearly scarred in many ways by that experience and tough and. There was a real veneer. It was fairly impenetrable how to get to that. I think thats actually a fairly common experience, especially men of that generation in germany, because theres so much shame. Ultimately, some amount of confusion i think also in how to this, they had a really strong sense of what you could talk about in which you couldnt. What you should say in which you shouldnt. But no idea of how to exist within that. I think thats one of the things where, to me, its so important to talk about that kind of experience because that feeling, anytime a topic has boundaries that are impressed upon it in that way and that the people who have experience feel pressing them down, you are not going to thats dangerous. You create pressure under that. In the far right in the front. Thank you. Hi, jessica. I absolutely love your book. I thought it was wonderful and its a big reason why i agreed to come to this conference with my husband. My questions were, the description of just the heroism involved in getting back to any sort of semblance of normal life and putting social structures back together. It was very interesting. How did you decide to make the book about these three women and also, who were the models for the three characters . Especially marianne who is so strong and kind of unusual in the way in how vibrant and stubborn she was. Yeah. They are three very fictional characters. I cant point to anyone, including my grandmother, as a model for a certain character. I would say the marianne figure, whos kind of at the center of the book and who was the woman who was a resist or in her own right as well. I read a lot of memoirs of windows of the resistance. One of the more striking ones to me, she was a very german type in a way. The anya character draws a lot more from my own family stories and my grandmothers experience. The third woman in the book is sort of someone who is a political. I think of her as the embodiment of the kind of person whos just living the life that is right in front of them and really not interested in engaging in the broader picture. But she keeps getting dragged in because her husband is a part of this plot and is executed. I think we all know people who are, you know, there are people who dont see the forest for the trees. And there are people who dont see the trees for the forest. I think of marianne and many of the resistance as seeing the forest and not the trees. Anita is the one who is seeing right here, but not the big picture. The next question is to your left, speakers. Do you think your grandmother would have felt the need to be understood if the nazis had won the war . Oh, gosh. Its almost impossible to imagine. I think theres a tv show then imagines that right. So i guess i could watch. If any winning ideology, i think when you follow in ideology and it emerges victorious, that ideology is shored up. I would like to hope that the forces of a light and goodness and humanity would exposed the cracks in that ideology and that there would be a powerful resistance movement. But were getting into sort of kind of tsai finally there. I think that by the end of the war, my grandmother and many people like her saw how evil the war was. That was already happening. But if they had one, i guess there would have been no into the war. We will go towards a right. Thank you. Im a great writer of fiction, but i will make an exception for your book i believe. Being of german ancestry myself, quick question, whats your maiden name . My maiden name . My maiden name is my maiden name. Oh, what was my german families, my mothers name was tele. Next question is to dan on your left. Hi, thank you so much for your presentation. Im also have chairman and still have relatives on a farm in germany. When i want to know, because i think its important when we assess history, how we can learn from it and prevent the same things from happening again. From what foundation are framework should be looked at what took place so we could avoid this from happening again. Pope john paul the second said this a Society Without values, which weve been slipping into, hes a thinly disguised to tell it therrienism. From what you learned, what would we take away from here today to think about as human beings so we dont allow Something Like this to happen in our world again. Its a good question. Comes up a lot when im talking about this. I wish there were easy answers. I think we all wish there were easy answers of what to learn, and there are 1 million ways to answer that question. But i think the most important one, i think i mentioned early on as we were talking here, but to me something that i learned from this was the importance of cross examining the narratives that we are fed and intern tell ourselves. So if youre watching fox news every night, watch msnbc. If youre watching msnbc every night, watch fox news. Theres an importance. Play your own devils advocate in the stories being spun. There is an Infinite Power of narrative in the way we understand the world, especially in the world as a as the one we live in now. The forces of globalization played a role in hitlers rise to power for sure. Immigration and the sense of where germany fit in a world economy. And those forces are very much at play now. I think that to understand them, we have to always condensed things into not shells, but those matches are often deeply inadequate to understand it. I think that is one. Then i also think just being aware of the lie of simple answers. I think that hitler was really good at presenting these really kind of Simple Solutions and answers to things that were really complicated. People just latched onto them and that was part of the trip toward evil. I think that exists today as well. When things are overly simple, my are my ears always pick up. What is being lost here . Whats wrong steps are we taking . I have to slip in with one question. We talked about resistance and forgiving and things like that, but some people never forgot and think we have a moral responsibility never to forget. I think of certain reporters who crossed the rhine with allied troops and were with them till the end. They saw the Liberation Movement and the camps and things like that. They say the same thing. Both of them refused to eat with germans, refused to each airman food. They hated everything by germany and lived to a very advanced old age. They had never had that feeling before. Theres that group as well. Im wondering if the resisters, if they had lived, they certainly went to the grave feeling that way. They did not want to understand nazism, they wanted to kill nazism. Yeah. I mean, that vein is. [inaudible] miller makes an interesting observation for the end of her life. She says i see it as a youth movement. I think it appears again, it will be the kids who will be putting the swastikas on the synagogues. And that is happening. Right. Right. Yeah, i think everyones interest in this time and way of metabolizeing it is based on their own experience as well. So certainly that is a valid, you know, reaction. Yeah, sorry to the. A couple of questions to your right. Im curious on the interplay between research and riding for your book. How Much Research did you do before putting pen to paper . Did you do Additional Research after finishing the peace . Thats a great question. I think of the two as being totally entwined. I have a friend who talks about how a researching for historical fiction is like swimming. You cannot do all your breathing and then take all your strokes. I totally feel the same way. I am just using her line. I think i had a foundation of Research Just because of my lifelong interest in this subject. I had done a lot of reading before ever started this book. Once i started writing, it was a constant kind of, ive written this chapter, now i am realizing any to understand what was going on in 1923 and what was happening in that community to decide how this person ended up 20 years later. Then i would put the writing aside and delve into researching. But i have to say, as a historical fiction writer i think a lot about how people did Historical Research before the internet, because while we have to start with books and make sure we are reading vetted sources, there are so many amazing nuggets of granular information that you can get online. For instance, i am writing a scene where a girl is standing in a hitler style uniform, and i said would she be hot if it was a hot day . What did this look like . Would she be feeling the scratch of the wall . I am two clicks away from an actual be dm uniform being sold on ebay. And i can see exactly what it looked like, exactly what it was made up. So for that level of the textural stuff is that the internet was wildly helpful. One final question to your right. I was wondering if you could comment on the other side with younger people maybe disregarding my grandfather. When i was in high school as a German Exchange student in the mid eighties, i arrived at the home, and there is a photograph on the tv of an ancestor who is in an suv form. When i woke up the morning after, the picture was no longer there and it did not commit again the entire time i stayed with that family. With your research, did you find people who are proud versus trying to minimize whats perhaps their grandparents roles were . I didnt personally, but i absolutely know of those stories. I think one of my favorite sources for this book was a source by a woman named allison owens. It is german women recalling the third right. Its an oral history that she took and it came out in 1994 or something. She interviewed all of these women from that era. They span the gamut from resistance, resist ors, to people in the middle to people who are, in 1992 or whenever she is conducting the interview, are still unrepentant nazis saying that hitler actually had a lot of good things to offer. That was out there. I think there was less and less. You mentioned this was in the eighties. This was probably happening, i hope, and just certainly the time is pushing it in the direction of, but to be sure, not every german has reckoned with that time in a real way. I think we will end it there, and its such a great session that our neighbors behind us were applauding for you. Thank you, don. Thank you. Weeknights this month, we are featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Many new stories this electioneer focused on voters in the suburbs. Friday night, four films made in the 19 fifties when the suburbs experienced a period of unprecedented growth. Including the film all the way home, a 1957 film dramatizing the prejudice and rumors that horizon a fictional white suburb on a black families scene visiting a home but a for sale sign on the front lawn. Watch beginning at 8 pm eastern, and enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan 3. American history tv on cspan three, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 10 pm eastern on real america, as Health Officials prepare to roll out a vaccine against the coronavirus, we take you back in time with five or cable films about vaccines and the fight against disease. On sunday at 6 pm eastern on american artifacts, tour new york citys Lower East Side Tenement Museum with reconstructed dwellings that show how immigrant families coped with poverty and crowded conditions in the 19th and early 20th century. At 6 30 pm, a look at president ial leadership during the cold war, with historian william hitchcock, also the author of the age of eisenhower, america and the world in the 19 fifties. At 9 pm, a u. S. Constitutional debate hosted by the Colonial Williamsburg foundation featuring a reenactment from Founding Fathers James Madison and george mason. Watch American History tv this weekend on cspan 3. Every saturday at 8 pm eastern on American History tv on cspan 3, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights, and u. S. President s to 9 11. Thank you for your patience and for logging into class with most College Campuses closed due to the impacts of