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A review by karnaconverse
Motherland by Maria Hummel
4.0
A World War II story set partly during the four months from December 1944 to March 1945 and alternating between Weimar, Germany, where surgeon Frank Kappus has been called to serve his country and Hannesburg, Germany where Liesl, Frank's wife and stepmother to his three sons, strives to keep the family together amid growing food shortages, an increasing number of attacks from Allied planes, and an increasing presence of Nazi Party officials.
The opening scene—Liesl's neighbor has dug a tunnel connecting his cellar to theirs—immediately plunges readers into the family's precarious existence as ten-year-old Hans casually explains the purpose of the tunnel to Liesl: “It’s for our safety. People can get trapped. It happened in Kassel and Darmstadt. If we neighbors adjoin our cellars, then we have a better chance of survival. Everyone knows that.”
The second part of the story shows the after-effects of the war on the people of Germany: the lack of food, the rubble, the unexploded bombs, the fall of the Third Reich, the ultimate interrogations by the Americans, and most notably, an attitude of disbelief as noted in this question posed to Liesl: "You never had conversations about your country and what it was doing to the Jews?"
Hummel's novel was inspired by her father's German childhood, is based loosely on letters her grandmother wrote her grandfather during the war, and goes well beyond the often-asked Holocaust-related questions of "what did they know and when did they know it?".
The opening scene—Liesl's neighbor has dug a tunnel connecting his cellar to theirs—immediately plunges readers into the family's precarious existence as ten-year-old Hans casually explains the purpose of the tunnel to Liesl: “It’s for our safety. People can get trapped. It happened in Kassel and Darmstadt. If we neighbors adjoin our cellars, then we have a better chance of survival. Everyone knows that.”
The second part of the story shows the after-effects of the war on the people of Germany: the lack of food, the rubble, the unexploded bombs, the fall of the Third Reich, the ultimate interrogations by the Americans, and most notably, an attitude of disbelief as noted in this question posed to Liesl: "You never had conversations about your country and what it was doing to the Jews?"
Hummel's novel was inspired by her father's German childhood, is based loosely on letters her grandmother wrote her grandfather during the war, and goes well beyond the often-asked Holocaust-related questions of "what did they know and when did they know it?".