Culture Watch: Indomitable Women in Three Compelling World War II Books

Culture Watch: Historical Memories, Both Collective and Individual, in Three Compelling World War II Books

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), the Bourbon Palace, Paris; July 1941

These three compelling books are both similar to and different from each other. Central to all three is the importance of women in keeping their families together under the most agonizing conditions of exile in Germany and France during WW II. Although similar in setting, narrative and characters, each book provides different perspectives on history, demonstrating that historical memories are both collective and individual. A love affair with "the enemy" is central in each story, causing us to deeply reflect on the impact of war on human relationships. Each narrative also creates suspense as to its outcomes keeping the reader deeply engaged.

A World Elsewhere is a moving memoir of the author's mother, Aimee, based on the hundreds of letters between her mother and father, family diaries, and her mother’s letters to her friends. Aimee, whose mother died when she was a child, flees what she experiences as an unhappy, boring life in upper middle class West Hartford, Connecticut. On completing high school and the compulsory debutante ritual, Aimee flees America to live — and live it up — in Paris in the period between WW I and WW II, comfortably supporting herself on her mother's inheritance. There she meets, falls in love with, and eventually marries Heinrich, a member of the Baltic German aristocracy. His family, which had lived in St. Petersburg for over 600 years, was forced to leave during the Russian Revolution, but recreated an idyllic life on their country estate, Ottenhof, in a rural area near the German border. Aimee is determined to become part of Heinrich's family; when an acquaintance asks her when she plans to return to America, she adamantly responds, "Never."

As WW II drags on, the advancing Russians approach Ottenhof and Aimee and Heinrich, with their four (later six) children, become refugees, like thousands of others, trekking westward through Germany. Through family connections they are able to buy a farm near Berlin, but their hope of establishing a stable life is thwarted by economic and domestic burdens, which mainly fall on Aimee. Heinrich, unhappy with their farming life, attempts to pursue his stalled career as a diplomat. With Hitler in power this requires him to join the Nazi party, which he does unenthusiastically. He participates in Germany's occupation of France, which he finds very agreeable, foreshadowing the complex relations, including collaboration, between the Germans and the French, which are also described in Suite Francaise.

Eventually recalled to Germany, Heinrich volunteers to serve on the Russian front, vividly describing in letters to Aimee, the brutality to civilians and soldiers he encounters there. The news of Heinrich's death in battle soon reaches Aimee, who must now reassess the danger of remaining with her family in a Germany rapidly being overrun by the advancing Russians. She asks herself if she and her family should flee the perils of the war yet again, and as they trek toward the American front reluctantly reconsiders whether she should return to America.

Aimee's trove of letters to her friends while in Paris, and later, to her husband, in Hitler's Germany, barely mention politics, about which she expresses little interest or knowledge. Nor do Heinrich's letters from Paris, where he worked as a Nazi intelligence officer in the earlier part of the war, refer to the brutal Nazi policies that caused so much death and destruction to their family and the wider world. This lacuna may distance Aimee and Heinrich from readers who have a broader view and interest in the war. In spite of Aimee's almost exclusive focus on her own family, however, we cannot help but be in awe of her intelligence, courage, hard work, sense of responsibility and determination to save those close to her, in the most despairing conditions. Her successes indeed seem miraculous.

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Culture Watch: Historical Memories, Both Collective and Individual, in Three Compelling World War II Books

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