influenced her work and how it formed her view of german citizens during world war ii. it was hosted by the world war ii museum in new orleans. >> welcome back. this next session is a unique one for our conference. for those who come here regularly, you're used to seeing the biggest and brightest minds in the field of world war ii history. this normally means the best-selling authors of history books, leading professors, dotcomtarians, but when we were planning this year's program, we decided to mix it up by inviting a novelist and only the second one that we've hosted in the conferences for the entire time we've been doing these. don miller is also one of our longest-standing advisers and counselors. he's a conference press. he's also like we heard from rick atkinson this morning, he's looking into another time period in our important period in our history and will be soon coming out this october with "vicksburg: grant's campaign that broke the confederatety." when the committee decided on this idea for a session, don told us immediately that we had to invite jessica shattuck, author of "the women in castle." so to hear about jessica's book and the differences and similarities in researching and writing these two genres, join me in welcoming don miller and jessica shattuck. [ applause ] >> okay. we're going to get started. it's good to see everyone. although i can't see you with these lights. but seeing people who take the trip with us and the regulars at the difference 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 tripped over her not bodily but her book. i was in heathro airport, looking for something to read and i grabbed it in the airport and read it on the plane and then when i got home and i was taken away. this is a sweeping, beautifully written historical novel in the highest sense. it has real feel for the subject. it's based deeply on the best recent german scholarship, christopher browning, diaries, you name it. but it's not clunky. it's a -- jessica is, first of all, a plotter. she believes in storytelling. and the book is a wonderful meld of storytelling and illuminating history. and it's -- it's about the widows of -- since we -- the museum has never made a mistake, by the way, and i think -- nor have i. and i don't know about jessica. but for some reason her bio didn't get into the program. now, i don't know, it must have been the printer, it could have been anybody at the museum. no one has taken responsibility. but i ought to say this, that she's from brookline, massachusetts, the mother of three. this is her third novel. there's a fourth one bubbling up there in her big brain. and she has a degree, an ma from harvard, and an mfa from columbia and has written, i think, a real tour deforce here. what i was drawn to in this book is, it's about three women who are the widows of the plotters and conspirators who went after hitler in july of 1944 and almost assassinated him. it's not about that, the assassination. it's about the lives of the women in the aftermath of the assassination. and so it presents itself, to me, at least, as i'm reading, as a novel about resistance. these are the ones who took -- made the choice and decided to risk their own lives to save their country. and they are heroic figures. and one of the figures is the central figure in the novel, her name is marianna and she's been part of this plot with her husband from 1938 on. and she has pledged to her best friend and her husband that she will take care of -- they all know they're going to get killed. they have a real inkling that this ain't going to work and she's going to take care and go after and find the widows and see that they're hidden and taken care of. and she does. she collects two of them in this crumbles castle and there the novel begins. i'm getting a novel really that's more about complicity than resistance. you know, you -- i'm thinking of sartra which is all about choice. that's what this novel was to me, anyway. if you decide to do nothing against a regime that is maniacal, that's a choice. you are in a sense an enabler. and we are made by our choices. that's who we are. and that's what this book is ability. it's also a book that opportunity condemn. it's a book about understanding and i thought that was subtlety done as well. magically, jessica manages to intermix this with some really fine history. you learn about dp camps, displaced persons camps, refugee camps, german logger camps for the german youth. that was one of the chapters that had the most pull for me. what is the pull of hitler? not hitler the monster, but hitler the idealist. people joined this cause because they believe in a different kind of germany. they believe in a different kind of future. you get refugees in berlin with the red army there, people under the bombs. you get this wonderful view of jeremy, late 1945, 1956 and it bounces back and forth. and then as i'm reading this, and i'm going to turn this over to jessica, i'm reading this, i thought, i read this -- i read this piece in the "new york times" that she wrote. and it went viral on the net. it's called "i love my grandmother, but she was a nazi" march 24, 2017. and i think, yeah, this is a woman who wrote that terrific piece and i'm reader her novel. so it's based upon -- it has its foundation in some real history, some family history. and jessica, if you could start us with that. how you came to write this novel. >> yeah, so, thank you. thank you, don, for inviting me to come here and to the world war ii museum. i'm honored to be the second representative of my genre -- >> we have no idea who the first one was. >> hopefully he wasn't egged off the stage. i am really, really honored to be here. this book took me over seven years to research and write. and so to get the call and to be 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 and i love hearing the conversations and having the conversations about that. can you all hear me all right. is this sounding good? okay. so i'll talk about how i came to write this book which don has explained very, very beautifully here. i love when other people tell what my book is about so i don't have to give my three-minute elevator pitch that i've given 7,000 times. how i came to this is that i'm -- it comes from a very personal place for me. i'm half german and i grew up with a very conflicted sense of my german identity. my mother was born in 1943 and grew up on a small farm that had been in her family for over 500 years. she came to america at the age of 19 and never went back. became an american citizen as fast as she could and didn't go back to visit her parents for the first six years that she was here. and 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 and 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 having kind of grown up with that conflicted feeling and also with a strong awareness of the holocaust and world war ii, i can't remember a time in my life that i didn't know what the holocaust and i didn't understand that germany had started world war ii. those things percolated in me for a long time. and 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'd had with her parents and what kinds of questions she 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. and i spent a good deal of time in my -- when i was in college, actually, from my undergraduate thesis, interviewing my grandmother about her experience of 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 -- i always knew i 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, that was one of the things that i had always known, oh, they were -- they were ordinary germans and like many germans of my generation, i sort of said, if people would say, you know, oh, what does that mean? were your grandparents were nazis? no, they were just ordinary and my grandfather fought in the -- he was in the army. but, of course, as anyone knows, all of you here who know so much about this area, know that it encompasses a giant swath of experience. it's not exonerating to have fought in the army. you could have done a different number of things. when i spent that summer on the farm entering my grandmother and talking to her about that time, she took me back to the beginning. it was 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. 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 '37 and this was in her words as idealists which obviously has a perverse sound to it. she says you have to understand we -- you know, this was -- d this was during the clinton era and i had been talking about how i was interested in joining the national service program that clinton was putting into place as a college student. and she said, this is what we wanted to do, was a lot like your national service program. and i said, no, no, no. really, it was not like the national service program. but her point was, i think, that what she had been drawn to was this youth work that was idealistic in her mind because it was leading loggers, which were something that happened all over germany, it was a required year on the land for german boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 15. and it stemmed from this sort of ideology of, again, kind of perversely, this sort of -- what my grandmother was drawn to was the nature of it, it was going to take the children of aristocrats and the inner city children and everyone was going to live together in these camps on the land and volunteer for the local farmers and learn about agriculture that way and, of course, underlying this, what my grandmother didn't talk about was this played very much into hitler's ideology of uniting the german race with the german soil and returning germany to its agricultural might and that connects to the -- >> you talk about that, what froze me for a second is, her emphasis on the character, on -- not just solidarity, but cooperation. almost a socialistic kind of -- this is a camp to break down class distinctions. tell me a little bit about that. >> it was definitely her picture of her and her -- according to her stories, it was her lived reality in those early years. this began before the war. and then of course as soon as the war was happening, this program got sluhrunk down and i had morphed into darker programs that were feeding young men into the ss and in the east there were the sort of programs that some of you may have heard of, it was to have -- to arm the peasants of the east -- to make them into a militia and they were sending young men out there to be educated. but also to kind of be fodder for the war. that part my grandmother was never a part of. her dealings and my grandfather were done with them in i think '39 was their last year there. but it was enough -- her point in talking about this and what struck me so much about this, was her desire to explain to me how what had drawn her into this movement that became synonymous with evil was -- it wasn't that she was drawn to it because of anti-semitism. that was the status quo of life then. i don't think she would have argued that their wasn't anti-semitism in it, but i didn't come from a place of hate. it came from a place of -- all of these -- the cooperation, the class -- breaking down the class divisions. and i think her idea here was not to excuse herself but to explain the danger of following one narrative and not necessarily lifting it up and seeing what was on the other side. >> she's not looking for forgiveness. >> i felt 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 cross-examine your own narratives, the narratives that are fed to you. make sure you are playing devil's advocate at every turn. >> when you're asking her questions from the article, how did you not know what hitler was up to. you listened to the radio. you saw the newspapers. what were her explanations for that? >> well, i think for her, she was like many people who lived rural germans of that time who insisted, i never saw any of that and there were -- i never knew any jews and i didn't press her as hard as i would have now when i was writing this book on that. i don't think that's 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% and there were very few jews living in many rural communities, but still. there are ways that if you had, you know -- if you were awake and alert, you would have seen the signs and seen what was unfolding around you. but i think that brings me to another part of what i really tried to write about in my book, in trying to understand and think about the german experience of that time and even more so the german experience in the aftermath of that time when people were reckoning with themselves was kind of how much people saw and knew what they wanted to. and for those of you who speak german, there are -- i come back to the idea that in the german language, there are two words for knowledge -- for knowing. there's vissen and kennin which is related to being acquainted with facts. you can -- if you talk about knowing someone, you can -- it's a -- in the kennin family. if you talk about understanding something, it's vissen and that's telling about how in all cultures we have levels of what we know and how -- what we allow ourselves to know and within that scale we include turning a blind eye versus being curious and lifting up those stones and looking at what's under them. >> and i kept thinking when i was 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 when -- >> i thought about it a lot. and i think that -- one thing about studying and writing about civilians at that time and ordinary germans is how -- how totally engaged they were in their own direct lives and what was immediately in front of them. and i think about how easily i can be completely consumed by my immediate life, getting any kids to school, walking the dog and paying the bills and what am i going to make for dinner tonight. this is in a peacetime when i have -- there's 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 and then i put myself back in that time and there was a war unfolding. all of the questions of how am i going to feed my children dinner, where am i going to go since my apartment got bombed were so much more pressing and there was so much less access to a diversity of news sources that it seems of course i can imagine how people were completely wrapped up in their own small world and didn't want to see what was outside that. one of the things that -- one of the pieces that 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. and that factors into my book somewhat heavily. but the level of conscripted workers. there were so many in small towns working, agricultural, in big cities, working in the industry. and these people were being marched to their worksites and that to me is -- how could you not see that? how could you accept that? >> even your resister, marianna, who is the leader of the resisters, she has a farm worker and he's given some polish workers and dps, refugees, and he whips them and he reads nazi propaganda and believes they're less than human and her and her husband allow it, right? >> yeah, they're members of the resistance, but yet they have this going on on their estate and this comes back and haunts her afterwards. but during the war -- this was very much called from -- i read so many memoirs of that time of resisters and of other ordinary germans. but this was a theme that i came across in several resisters memoirs talking about the -- looking back and realizing, oh, i actually -- on this level, i was doing what 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 before -- not here, but -- you made a very interesting observation. germany, of course, has done an awful lot to engage its students in monstrous history of the reich and we ran into some students on a recent trip in the holocaust section of the imperial war museum, as much as they've 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 that despite the museums and the films and everything else, when you talked to individual germans they don't want to take it down to the family level. do you find that? >> we were discussing this because i -- i found that very interesting in doing my research that i would talk with people of my generation and below about, you know -- 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 opa do during the war? oh, he was in the vermont. was he a member of the party? i don't know. i don't think so. it was interesting to me -- including my own cousins who said, how come you know so much more about what their lives were like during the war. and they lived on the other half of the farm, they shared the same house. and i think actually there's an answer in that, that when you live so closely to something, you kind of -- it's painful to go to that place. and i think for many people, there was a different kind of turning a blind eye and not wanting to know. i'm american, i live here in america. i identity as half german. i've 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 -- i want to talk about one other thing that i think a lot of germans -- i'm surprised how little they know about some of the immediate pieces of the postwar period that i -- in my book i write a little bit -- i have a character who is a german p.o.w. who is kept in one of the -- in the beginning he's in one -- he gets moved to a different camp that is in the american sector and then in the french sector. and several of my german reads, including my aunt said, what are you talking about? i've never heard of this. and it's interesting because so many german men were actually held after the war. the last german p.o.w. didn't come back from russia until 1956. and the english countryside was at some point i read some statistic that -- this could be wrong. i have a bad head for numbers. but i think it was like 25% of the agricultural workers in england were german p.o.w.s up until 1952 or something. >> we still have -- germany had those dp camps in the 1950s. >> and that's a whole separate things. 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 little studied or discussed. and i don't know if that is out of the trauma of it or out of the shame if your grandfather was in a p.o.w. camp after the war. no one wanted to talk about when opa didn't come home from the war for the extra six months, but that's very interesting to me. >> you break a lot of stereotypes in the book. you go after holocaust history, on one side you have ann frank, the martyr. hitler the monster. and this way of teaching german history. my students can't relate to it, ann frank is too heroic and hitler is too evil to relate to. but operating on the edge of the holocaust and getting these ordinary germans in there then people with understand, they can ask what i would i have done. >> i did feel 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's experience of that war. we haven't even gotten into the resistors, but i was looking for other models and other fiction in english that dealt with the grey zone around the dark epicenter of world war ii, which is the holocaust, but the gray ordinary matter where most germans lived. i found very little. that's 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're saying. smums i wonder if we're in a little danger in the world of world war ii fiction of continuing to tell the same stories that are on one hand a -- the ank ann frank story, and over here, the voyeuristic inside look at the darkest -- >> that's how high school kids are taught. that's how they're taught, how it goes. >> yeah, that seems to me very troubling. in either of those places is a mirror that you hold up to yourself. hopefully most of us can't relate at all to the ss sicko or -- who made the lamp shades out of human skin? that kind of story that we focus on. and over here we can imagine the horror of being a victim and ultimately of also survivors, but they don't relate to our everyday lives. whereas this whole zone here does. so i worry that we're kind of -- that we're missing a lot of opportunities to learn from that time period. >> there's a resistor museum in amsterdam that does it beautifully with a door scene. you know, you're jewish, you lived in this neighborhood for 25 years and you knock on the door and ask to be taken in and hidden. the person that answers the door can say yes or no, but they point that out. if you say yes, your whole family is pulled into this, where they would have never been pulled into it before. it is all right for you to go out and make heroic decisions in the street. but now down to your 6-year-old child, they're in this, and the dutch are so much like us. they like to make money, they're capitalistic, they have democratic traditions. and there you can see it, you know? what would i have done kind of a thing. >> and there is also a distinction in the, you know, i write about the resistance here, which i'll talk about in a minute how i came to that part of this. but i think of it that there are two categories of people. there are the resistors, and then there are the kind of -- the helpers. the acts like someone knocking on your door saying can you hide me and my son in your attic, to respond to that and to take that risk was a totally different kind of action than to take the kind of action of the characters in my book that were part of an organized resistance where they were talking about systemic overall and overthrowing hitrlehitler. >> tell us about that resistor group you met in new york. >> so how i came to this is i knew i wanted to write something that connected to my family's experience, but i wasn't sure what my way in was. and then what i realized is that i needed a foil. i feel like. and i grew up in this apartment building in new york city and four floors above us was a woman who was also german, and my mother's age and had a daughter one month older than me. my mother and this woman met in the elevator and realized they were both german and became best friends. their backgrounds could not have been more different. this woman was the daughter of a resistor. her father had been executed in the aftermath of the failed 20th of july plot. at some point not long after my mother died i went with this friend of hers to her mother's 80th birthday celebration. and this was kind of a reunion of widows of the resistance of sorts. there was many people there who knew each other from that time. fewer men than women of that generation because the women were the survivors. and i was really struck in that time by how different my friend's families' legacy, how different her relationship to her family's legacy than my own. and her -- the grandfather, the patriarch of that family had seen the evil of hitler unfold in real time and taken courageous action against it. whereas my own grandparents turned a blind eye or tried not to know and done nothing. so i think that to me there is a real interesting question in there. what ed -- made it -- what made these people have the courage? >> you have two types of exposure. these people back to the choice thing, a lot of your characters here, they belong to some in the old prussian aristocracyaristoc. it's very close to the valkerie group. and then you have at the end, you have these farmers, peasants like your grandparents. it's the end of the war and americans are dropping leaflets with pictures of the camps, and they don't believe it. they think it is a lot of propaganda. so one group takes the information and absorbs it and acts. the other group just pushes it. >> yeah. >> is it this desire to just go on with life and to not be touched by this, not to commit? >> i think it is so much more circumstantially driven. you go in wanting to uncover what is the character trait are the person that takes action or doesn't. my opinion of many of the memoirs was in many cases there was a simple access to information that they had and it was somewhat class driven. many of the resistors were aristocrats, and many of them as aristocrats had positions of power in the government and had access to a lot more information early on. so there was a resistance that began as soon as they really knew what was happening after the conference. it was right there, that many of them had access to secret documents that no one else was going to see. many of the sort of peasants were living their lives and listening to the radio and what it's telling them and trying to find a new home after their house was bombed. didn't have that access. sure, there were rumors, and that's something i think about, too. and you had soldiers on the front saying i saw the most horrible thing. so once a letter like that arrives how do you ignore that? it starts to get circulated. i talked to somebody about that. someone said you know for one thing it was easy to dismiss someone's sister's brother's uncle said this we already know how much easier it is to dismiss than having access to a secret government document. but it's also a -- it's also a question of what -- again, what you want to choose, i think how much people wanted to go down that road. >> yeah, you say they didn't get a lot of anti-semitism, but they did teach eugenics. they taught nazi supremacy in the darwinian sense, the struggle, the race. she picks up on this and she bought it, and your character buys it. there was a great scene, we'll talk about that, but there's a great scene where anya, the woman who runs the logger, it's many years later and her daughter is talking to her and says how could you believe this stuff? she said it's like that camp -- what was the name of the camp? >> the summer camp. >> it's like the summer camp you go to. the kid goes, are you shitting me, a summer camp, a nazi youth camp the same thing? so she continues to believe this. did your grandmother continue to believe this? >> no, i don't think -- you mean like the eugenics ideas. i think a lot of that stuff that you absorb as -- you're told, you brought up, she had crazy ideas about things like protein is -- you have to have certain amounts of egg white protein, like this probably came from some period science. >> there is a book by a recent scholar like 800 pages, but almost everybody this guy interviewed believes exactly the same things they believed in the '30s. >> yeah. you mean the people that he interviews? >> yeah. >> yeah, yeah. some of the teachings were sort of -- i think the big ones have been debunked but the little ones that add up to them, like the protein is going to lead to a bigger brain, and that's why people in northern europe have bigger brains. things like that might still permeate. >> do you think people like your grandmother deserve to be forgiven? >> i don't like when it comes down to forgive or not forgive. i don't feel like it's up to me to forgive. i feel like it is up to the survivors and the victims to forgive. and i also feel like it is an unhelpful lens to look through. because it ends up putting us back in that block and white territory. so i prefer to think of it as -- i don't think that's what she was looking for. i think -- >> complete understanding, empa threatably. >> understanding and understanding that hopefully, i mean, part of what at some point when i was first writing this book, i was talking with my agent who said something like well, if you're going to write -- i think it was before i wrote the op-ed, and i said i'm trying to figure out what i want to say, and he said your grandparents were nazis. what do you do with that, right? and i was like i don't have an answer, i guess i can't write the op-ed. because i don't know what my answer is. and then i thought that is the answer, to me, being here, writing the book, talking about this and making these sort of taboo subjects something that we can 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. so to try to learn from it in a less boundaried way. i have a friend who is a fiction writer who is the granddaughter of holocaust survivors, and we've done a bunch of talks on the radio and at different formats talking about what each of us -- what it means to us to come from this place and what it means for us to be having a conversation like that. it has been interesting. >> so this is your first shot at historical fiction. you have history here. you have fiction here, and there's supposed to be a boundary between them and you're melding the two. how did you find that process of writing historical fiction? >> i had never done it before. i loved it. i'm sticking with it. my next book will have a present day part but it's also historical. i feel like there is a richness. the research is so fascinating and there is a richness that you can bring to any story when you're grounding it in pieces of real history. there is a depth there that i think is harder to achieve when you're looking at the world around you in realtime. >> we're going to hope this up to the audience. jeremy, are you around for questions? >> i'll let you choose. >> before we get to questions, thank you both for an engaging and interesting conversation. [ applause ] the first question is to the speakers right in the very back. >> first i want to thank you very much for talking about this subject. i am kind of the flip side. 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 share my family's stories with them. i think it is important what you talked about with that gray area. the further we away we get from the war and what happened, my students also seem to think that these people were from another planet and they were so different and they were so alien to the way they could be or we could be, but it is important and i do try to explain to them that germans at the time, like your grandparents, were not really different than we are. and there is that question of what would we do? i also think the issue of choice, as you mentioned, that the women that you wrote about is very, very important. because even though they're 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 i am going to read your book, because i do agree with you that there isn't 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 of the back. >> thank you for sharing that. if you don't mind me asking, were you able to bring yourself to research on your grandfather on his wartime experiences? >> yeah, that's a good question. i was -- it was hard to find a lot of information, but i know that he served -- originally he was part of the liberation -- sorry, not the liberation. >> easy girl. >> he was part of the takeover of the occupation of paris. he was involved in marching in that direction. the liblatieration of paris. [ laughter ] and he was on the eastern front for a little while where he was wounded and sent home. beyond that, i don't know that much about what he did within that. and i have a research request in. there are probably a lot of experts here that can help me get this figured out faster. i have a research letter in to the cue through the german archives, the old red cross administered archives. you can do it now online, to try to get more. that's where i found the documentation. my aunt did something similar and we got the paper that shows when she and my grandmother joined the nazi party. >> tell them more about your grandfather's refusal to answer. >> it was funny, at some point i was saying to my sister, i don't know why i didn't press opi more when he was alive. how didn't i ask him more questions? how did i not get more information and more stories from him about that time? she turned to me and she said, i know why. because he was mean. [ laughter ] he was a very difficult person and he was clearly scarred in many ways by that experience and toughened and there was a real veneer of don't -- i mean, it was very impenetrable how to get to that. i think that's a fairly common experience of men in that generation. there's so much shame and ultimately an amount of confusion i think also in what -- how to -- there is so much of a really strong sense of what you could or could not talk about that. what you should say, what you shouldn't. but no idea of how to exist within that. that's one of the things where it's so important to talk about that kind of experience, because that feeling -- any time a topic has boundaries that are impressed upon it in that way, the people with experience have a feeling of being pressed down. that's dangerous. you create pressure under that. >> in the far right in the front. >> thank you. hi, jessica. i loved your book, i thought it was wonderful and that is a big reason why i agreed to come to this conference with my husband. so my questions were, the description of just the heroism involved, getting back to a normal life, putting social structures back together, it was very interesting. how did you decide to make the book about these three women, women in particular, who were the models of the three characters like marianne who was so unusual in that she was so vibrant and subborn. >> well, there was three very fictional characters, so i can't point to any of them as a model. i would say the marianne figure at the center of the book, she was a resistor in her own right, as well. i read a lot of memoirs of widows of the resistance, and one of the more striking ones to me, i think she was such a german type in a certain way. i think of marianne who was influential. and then the anya character draws a lot more from my family's stories and my grandmother's experience. and the third woman in the book is sort of a -- someone who is kind of apolitical. i think of her as the embodiment of the kind of person who is just living the life 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 he's executed. i think we all know people who are -- there are people who don't see the forest for the trees. and there are people who don't see the trees for the forest. and i think of marianne and many of the resistors, they see the forest but not the trees. and bonita is the one who is seeing right here but not the big picture. >> the next question is to your left, speakers. >> do you think that your grandmother would have felt the need to be understood if the nazis had won the war? >> oh, gosh, it's almost impossible to imagine. i think there's a tv show that imagines that now, so i guess i could watch. if any winning ideology, i think that when you follow an ideology that emerges victorious, that ideology is shored up. i would like to hope that the forces of light and goodness and humanity would have exposed the cracks in that ideology and that there would be a powerful resistance movement, but we're getting into almost like sci-fi land there. and i think that it took -- i think that by the end of the war, my grandmother and many people like her saw how evil the war was. so that was already happening. i guess if they had won, there wouldn't have been that end of the war. >> we're going to go towards your right. if you could please stand up. >> thank you. i'm not a great reader of fiction, but i'm going to make an exception with your book, i believe. a quick question, what was your maiden name? >> my maiden name? oh, my maiden name -- oh, my german family's name? it was tulla. >> next question is to dan on your left, please. >> hi, thank you so much for your presentation. i'm also half german and i still have relatives on a farm in germany. i want to know because i think it is important when we assess history how we can learn from it. and prevent the same things from happening again. from what foundation or framework should we look at what took place so we can avoid this from happening again? pope john paul ii said a society, without values, which we have been slipping into is a thinly disguised totaltarianism. so from what you learned, what would we take away from here today to think about as human beings so we don't allow something like this to happen in our world again? >> that is a good question. it comes up lot when i talk about this. i think we all wish there was easy answers of what to learn. and there are a million ways to answer that question. but i think that at the most important one i think i mentioned early on as we were talking here. to me something that i learned from this was the importance of cross examining the narratives that we're fed. and that we in turn tell ourselves. if you're watching fox news every night watch msnbc. if you're watching msnbc watch fox news, go back and forth. there is an importance on both -- and play your own devil's advocate in looking at the stories being spun. everything is being -- there is an infinite pow herb of narrative in how we understand the world, especially in a world as global as the one we live in now, which i think was in the beginning, the forces of globalization played a role in hitler's 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. and i think that to understand them we have to always condense things into nutshells. but those nutshells are often inadequate to understand. so i think that is one. i also think that being aware of the lie of simple answers. i think that hitler was brilliant at presenting these simple solutions and answers to things that were really complicated, that people just latched onto. and he completely -- you know, that was part of the trip toward evil. so i think that exists today, too. when things are overly simple. my hears always prick up like what is being lost here? what wrong steps are we taking? >> i have to slip in with one question. we talk 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 reporters that i have been reading a lot lately, those that crossed the rhine with allied troops and saw the catches and were part of the liberation movement and things like that. i've just been working at lee miller's archives. and they say the same thing. both of them refuse to eat with germans, refuse to eat german food. they hated everything about germany and lived to an advanced old age because of what they seen. and they never had that feeling before. so there is that group, too. i wonder if the resistors, if they had lived, would have -- certainly they went to the grave feeling that way. they didn't want to understand that issi -- want to understand naziism, they wanted to kill naziism. miller said i see it as a youth movement. i think it will be kids putting swastikas on synagogues. and that's happening. >> right. i think everyone's way of -- everyone's interest in this time and way of metabolizing it is based on their own experience, too. that is a valid, you know, reaction. >> sorry to do that. >> a couple questions to your right. >> i'm curious on the interplay of research and writing for the book. how much research did you do before pen to paper, did you come back and do additional research after finishing the piece? >> yeah, that's a great question. i think of the two as being totally entwined. i have a friend who talks about how researching for historical fiction is like swimming. you can't do all of your breathing and take all of your strokes, and i feel the same way. i'm just using her line. i think i had a foundation of research because of my lifelong interest in this subject. i had done a lot of reading before i started writing this book. there was a constant okay, let me -- i've written this chapter, now i need to understand what was going on in 1923, and what was happening in that community to understand where this person ended up, you know, 20 years later. and then i would put the writing aside and delve into researching it. as a historical fiction writer, i think about how people did historical research before the internet. while you have to start with books and make sure you're reading vetted sources, there are so many amazing nuggets of granular information that you could get i don't think, for instance, i'm writing a scene with a girl standing in a bbm, hitler youth sort of uniform. i remember thinking would she be hot if it was a hot day, what did this uniform look like? was it made of wool? would she be feeling the scratch of the wool? i'm two clicks away from an actual bdm uniform being sold on ebay and i can see exactly what it looked like, what it was made of. so for that level of the sort of texturial stuff of the internet was wildly helpful. >> one final question to your right again, please. >> i would wondering if you could maybe comment on the other side with the younger people maybe disregarding, oh, my grand father was in the vermont. when i was in high school as a german exchange student in the mid '80s, there was a photograph on the tv of an ancestor who was in an ss uniform. and when i woke up that morning that picture was no longer there and it didn't come out again the entire time i stayed with that family. so with your research, did you find people who were proud versus trying to minimize what their perhaps grandparent's roles were? >> i didn't personally, but i absolutely know of those stories. and i think one of my favorite sources for this book was a book by a woman named alison owings. and it is an oral history that she took. i think it came out in 1994. she interviewed all of these women from that era and they span the gamete of resistors to people kind of in the middle to people who are at -- in 1929, whenever she's conducting the interview, are still unrepen tanlt nazis and saying hitler had a lot of good things to offer. i think that was out there less and less. you mentioned this was in the '80s. i think this is 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'll end it there. it was such a great session that our neighbors behind us were afrauding for you. so thank you, dawn. thank you, jessica. we're standing in -- near the geographical center of san antonio, texas. we're in front of what's called the spanish governor's palace in a town that was actually

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