So, welcome back. This next session is a unique one for our conference. You know, were for those who have come here regularly, youre used to seeing the biggest and brightest minds in the field of world war ii history. This normally means the bestselling authors of history books, leading professors, documentarians, but when we were planning this Years Program we decided to mix it up by inviting a novelist, and only the second one weve hosted in the conferences for the entire time weve been doing these. Don miller, author of masters of the air, and ddays in the pacific is also one of our longest standing advisers and counselors. Shes a perennial conference presence. He is also like we heard from rick at kinson this morning hes also looking into another time period in our important period in our history, and will be soon coming out this october with vicksburg, grants campaign that broke the confederacy. You know, 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 in differences and similarities and the research and writing of these two genres, please join me in welcoming don miller and jessica shattuck. Okay. Were going to get started. Its good to see everyone, although i cant see you with these lights. But seeing people who take the trip with us and the regs 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 in heathrow airport, and my cover is a little bit different than the cover youre seeing. I have the british edition. Looking for something to read, i was on a Research Trip to england and i grabbed it in the airport and read it on the plane and when i got home i was taken away. This is a sweeping, beautifully written historical novel in the highest sense. In that it has real feel for the subject, its based deeply on the best recent german scholarship christopher browning, the ordinary men, you know, star guard, you know, diaries, victor clefrper, you name it. But its not clunky. Its not pedantry. Its a jessica is, first of all, a plotter. Shes a she writes in a fashion she believes in story telling. The book is a wonderful meld of story telling and illuminating history. And its its about the widows, since we you know the museum has never made a mistake, by the way. And i think that nor have i. And i dont know about jessica. But for some reason her bio didnt get into the you know, into the program. Now, i dont know, it must have been the printer. Couldnt have been anybody at the museum. No ones taking responsibility but i ought to say this. That shes from brookline, massachusetts, shes the mother of three, this is her third novel and there is a fourth one bubbling up there. You know, in her big brain. And she has a degree, an m. A. From harvard and an mfa from columbia. And has written, i think, a real tour deforce here. When i was drawn to in this book is its about three women who are the widows of the plotters and conspirators who went after hitler in july 1944. And almost assassinated him. But its not about that, the assassination. Its about the lives of the women in the aftermath of the assassination. And so it presents itself, to me at least as im 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 has been part of this plot with her husband albert from 1938 on and she has pledged to her best friend, and her husband that she will take care of they all know theyre going to get killed. They have a real inkling this aint going to work and shes going to take care and go after and find the widows, and see that theyre hidden and taken care of. And she does. She collects two of them in this crumbling bavarian castle and there the novel begins. Im ready for a novel about resistance and im getting a novel really thats more about complicity than resistance. You know, you im thinking of camu, of sartra and existentialism which is all about choice, and thats what this novel was to me, choices people make. If you decide to do nothing against a regime that is maniacal, thats a choice, you are, in a sense, an enabler and we are made by our choices, thats who we are. And thats what this book is all about. Its also a book that doesnt condemn its a book about understanding and that was very subtly done as well. And yet magically jessica manages to intermix this with some really fine history. You learn about dp camps, displaced persons camps, refugee camps, you learn about german logger camps for young for the german youth. That was one of the chapters that had the most pull for me, what is the pull of hitler . Not, you know, hitler the monster, but hitler as they see it the idealist, people join this cause because they believe in a different kind of germany. They believe in the future and you get a sense of the pull of fascism. You get refugees in berlin with the red army there, you get people under the bombs. You get this wonderful panoramic view of germany late 1945 and late 1946 and it bounces back and forth. And then as im reading this, and im going to turn this over to jessica, as im reading this, i thought, hey, i read this piece in the New York Times and she wrote, and it went viral on the net. Its called i love my grandmother, but she was a nazi, and march 24, 2017. And then i think, yeah, this is the woman who wrote that terrific piece and now im reading her novel. So its based upon it has its foundation in some real history, some family history. Jessica, if you could start us with that, i mean, how you came to write this novel. Yeah, so thank you, thank you, don, for inviting many eto come here and to the world war ii museum. Im honored to be the second representative of my genre. We have no idea who the first one was. Hopefully he wasnt, you know, 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 is means a lot to me, and i love hearing the conversations and having the conversations about that. So can you all hear me all right . Is this sounding good . Okay. So ill 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 dont have to give my threeminute elevator pitch that ive given 7,000 times. How i came to this is that im it comes from a very personal place for me. Im half german and 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 westphalia 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 didnt even 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. And 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 cant remember a time in my life that i didnt know what the holocaust was and i didnt understand what happened in world war ii germany. Those things percolated a long time. When i was 15 my mother passed away suddenly and i never had a chance, an adult way to have conversations with her about what it meant to grow up in her house and what kinds of conversations shed had with her parents and what kinds of questions shed put to them, what theyd 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, for 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 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, so that was one of the things that i had always known kind of, oh, they were you know, 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 naugzis, would say oh, ordinary person ordinary, and my grandfather was in the army, as anyone knows, all of you here who know so much about this area the vermakt includes a giant swath of experience and its not in any way exonerating to have fought in that, you could have done a million different things. When i spent that summer on the farm interviewing my grandmother and talking with her about that time she kind of took me back to the beginning and 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 37. And this was, in her words, as idealists, which obviously has a perverse sound to it but she said you have to understand we you know, this was this was during the clinton era. And i had 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 for and she said this was what we wanted to do was a lot like your National Service program. And i said, no, no, no, really, really, it was not like the National Service program. But her point was, i think, that what she had been drawn to was this kind of youth work that was idealistic in her mind because it was leading lantier loggers, 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 this egalitarian nature of it, that it was going to take the children of hamburg dock workers and the children of aristocrats and inner city children and rural children and everyone was going to live together in these camps on the land and volunteer for local farmers and learn about agriculture that way and of course underlying this, what my grandmother didnt really talk about, was this played very much into hitlers ideology of uniting the german race with the german soil and returning germany to its agricultural might, and that, of course, also connects to the you know, when you talk about, what really froze me for a second was her emphasis, the character, on solid not just solidarity, but cooperation. And almost a socialistic kind of this is a camp to break down class distinctions. Yeah. Tell me about that. That was definitely her picture of it and according to her stories it was her lived reality in those early years, which this began before the war. And then of course as soon as the war was happening this program got shrunk down and by the end of the war it basically didnt exist anymore. It had sort of morphed into much darker programs that were feeding young men into the ss and in the southeast there were the sort of veribower programs to arm the peasants of the east to fight basically to make them into a kind of militia and they were sending young men out there to be educated by 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 the lantier in i think 39 was their 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 what had drawn her into this movement that became synonymous with evil was something that wasnt you know, it wasnt that she was drawn to it because of anti semitism, although im sure that their that was the status quo of life then, i dont think she would have argued that there wasnt anti semitism in it but it wasnt it didnt come from a place of hate. It came from a place of all these other the cooperation, the egalitarianism, 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. Shes not looking for forgiveness. I never felt she was 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 crossexamine your own narratives, crossexamine the narratives that are fed to you, make sure you are playing devils advocate at every turn. When youre 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. Jews are pulled from the community. What were her explanations for that . Yeah. Well, i think that for her she always she was like many people who lived rural germans of that time who insisted, well, i never saw any of that. And there were i never knew any jews. And i didnt 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. And 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, 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 immediate 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. Theres visn, and any kind of derivative of that thats related to wisdom and theres kenin and a derivative to that, sort of being acquainted with facts. You can if you talk about knowing someone, you ken, in the kenin family, understanding something its visn. I think that that to me is very telling about how not just in germany, but 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 whats under them. 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 . I thought about it a lot. And i think that, i mean, one thick 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. And i think about how easily i can be completely consumed by my immediate life at getting my three kids to school and walking the dog, and paying the bills, and what am i going to make for dinner tonight . And this is in a peace time when i have 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. And 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 apartment got bombed . So much more pressing and there was so much less access to a diversity of news 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 that. I mean, 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 agriculture, in big cities working in the industry, and these people were walking through town and being marched to their work sites and that, to me, is a little bit of a how could you not see that and how could you suddenly accept that . You know well, even your resister marianna whos the leader of the resistors, she has a farm worker, and hes given some polish workers and dps, some refugees and he whips them, and he reads nazi propaganda and believes theyre less than human. And her and her husband allow it, right . Theyre 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, and this was very much culled from i read so many memoirs of that time of resistors and of other ordinary germans but this was a theme that i came across in several resistors memoirs talking about the looking back and realizing, oh, i actually you know, 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, is done an awful lot to engage its students in the monstrous history of the reich. We ran into students on a recent trip in the holocaust section of the imperial war museum. As much as theyve been educated in this, they were absolutely stunned by the photography and recreating of the auschwitz killing camp and things like that. You pointed out something i have found myself in doing research in germany that despite the museums and the films and everything else, when you talk to individual germans they dont want to take it down to the family level. Do you find that . Yeah, we were discussing this because 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