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 t