The past is another country : No Way Home
Marianne Wheelaghan, as some regular readers and commenters on this blog may realise, is a visitor and from time-to-time, a commenter, on here. She is also an author. Following a review of a book which had touched me quite deeply, around the subject of ‘displacement’ and never quite feeling at home in any country, Marianne made a comment which showed we had a certain connection – we are both the children of post-war immigrants. I had also visited Marianne’s blog, and read some posts she made about the search for home, and what home means, which spoke to me.
So, I had a sly little look at what kind of books she wrote, and discovered that the first one, The Blue Suitcase, was based around her mother’s life, growing up in Germany in the 30s. And I decided to investigate, a little nervously – I don’t review things by people I ‘know’ however ‘virtually’ – there’s a kind of curious intimacy which all writers reveal, but if you don’t ‘know’ them, outside their books, then everything they reveal, through their writing, consciously or unconsciously, is kind of ‘public domain’, whereas get to know an author, however tangentially, and it seems to me you can no longer read their works as if the book itself is all you are relating to
There is also, of course, the added problem – supposing you don’t like the book? Now, I only review on here, things I DO like, so it’s already a given, the review being here, that my viewpoint is positive – but potentially, perhaps stupidly, I had a kind of anxiety before reading – suppose I didn’t like it (and obviously, in that case, Marianne would never have known I had read it anyway, as I wouldn’t have reviewed it, whether on Amazon, or here, or even, mentioned that I had read it.) But, if that HAD been the case, I would have felt a kind of discomfort – how would my assessment of the work affect my assessment of the person who created the work. Writing is not separate from the life of the writer, and arises from the writer. as all ‘creativity’ does. So, after the preamble – which raises some interesting ideas, for me, about writers and their readers – the book:
Marianne Wheelaghan’s distressing, absorbing book about a young girl growing up in Germany in the 30’s was springboarded by her own family history, as that young girl was her mother. Marianne discovered a history her mother had never talked about, through journals she had kept, during the 30s and 40s, before she came to the UK after the war. She found the journals after her mother died and translated them
The Blue Suitcase is not ‘the translated diaries and journals’ – that would have been too private – but it is inspired by, based on, her reading of accounts of real events, and a real person, growing up at that time and in that place. The Blue Suitcase is of course a novel, but I sensed it was shaped by a writer, to give the feel and flow of fiction, but was not ‘an invention’
It was the complex, difficult authenticity it arose from which created a powerful response from me, as a reader. At times, too close for comfort, because the author herself must also have found the reading of the journals uncomfortable.
I must admit I put this book down, many times, overwhelmed by the imaginative, empathetic space which is created here. Starting in 1932, the journal writer is Antonia, Toni, a volatile self-obsessed twelve year old (as twelve year old often are), growing up in a dark time, a dark place, (Breslau, Silesia, 1932) Toni’s family is middle class; they are Catholics with a strong sense of morality – father a civil servant, mother a doctor. The entire family dynamics are strongly motivated by a sense of needing purpose and codes to live by which were more than just personal – the urge to serve something higher, clear. That ‘higher’ took one sister into being a ‘bride of Christ’ (a nun) one brother into Communism, another to join the Brownshirts, her law abiding conservative father, initially opposed to Hitler, keeping his head down and acquiescing, and her doctor mother, through her serving both her strong Christian faith and the Hippocratic oath, to be fierce and vocal against Fascism. Another sister surrendered into being the kind of hausfrau producing children for Germany.
Toni, through whose eyes we see everything is, at the start, at an age where she is all over the place in finding her own position within a family who clearly all took different positions driven by a sense of ‘greater good’. And I must say she both broke my heart repeatedly, and, made me laugh, (early on) simply by the normal adolescent stuff – the strong tempestuous passions – at some point in her diaries, she hates pretty well everyone in her immediate vicinity – not the orchestrated hatred which gets used by those who wish to foster division and violence against individuals – but the clear love and hatred volatility which children have. Young Toni, expressing this in her journal, made me laugh – whilst making me weep, because part of her ‘hatred’ came because she was being ignored because of everything which was developing in the wider world, as the National Socialists rose to power.
As the years roll on, and the terrible events associated with that time happen, both during the period before the war, during the war, and its aftermath, all times for lightness and laughter of course disappear. I began to think about a generation of young children growing up inside a system designed to force them out of humanity, as any totalitarian society, any society with rigidity and implacability as its core values does.
This book spoke strongly to me , for several reasons. – Firstly I am always fascinated by ‘through a child’s eye’ writing. It is the very changeability, the not yet fixed, restrained, masked, constructed quality to persona which intrigues. As someone long beyond that stage, I nevertheless can recognise the authenticity of writing which successfully comes from that place – or doesn’t. This does. My emotion was also of course, personal, in that I too have a family background which comes from Central Europe.
I’m also always interested in writing which touches on the sense of being displaced, and also that insidious thing called ‘survivor guilt’, and how the locking up of a terrible time so that it cannot be spoken of, still reaches down the generations. Not just those who lived through those times, but the children who were born into the post-war world, and absorbed this secrecy, this guilt, this displacement into their fabric, and passed their melancholy longing for something they couldn’t quite name, onwards. Both within my own family, and in the families of others with a similar history-of-time-and-place there is a particular privacy, a particular silence, more deep than the purely personal ‘skeletons in cupboards’ which I think every life tags along with it. There’s a kind of void too deep, too dark to enter. This is I think particular to those who have been engaged in war and conflict. Those of us born and living in safe societies in peace time cannot, I think, really comprehend that other place. We are fortunate.
Church Bridge Breslau, Silesia/Wroclaw, Poland Wiki Commons
I believe part of my need to stay connected to such stories is a working out of my own sorrow and compassion for ancestors I never met. For some, revisiting that past seems perhaps maudlin, or self-indulgent. For those, like me, who think these stories need telling – all our stories, and rather wish it were NOT the case that the stories should be told – the silencing of the stories would be a denial. I very much valued this, sharing the story of ‘ordinary Germans who were not Jews’ in that time. We all have a tendency to say this or that grouping of people are bad, this or that grouping are good – or even, make moral judgements on individuals – the good brother became a Communist, the bad brother joined the Brownshirts. But, from my comfortable, safe armchair in 2015, I am not pressurised and vulnerable to any kind of radicalisation – I am an adult, more fixed now in my beliefs, less needing of ‘peer approval’ than I was at that vulnerable teen-age.
There is a tipping point, where those peddling unthinkable prejudice seem stupid, risible, and not worthy of any serious consideration or resistance, because they are so clearly dismissed. That’s the point where they are the powerless minority. And then, if they are not taken seriously by the more rational and sensible, there may come a time when the rational and the sensible find that they are the powerless ones. This book shows how some of all that plays out in all of us ‘ordinary people’.
I recommend this, though it is a difficult and painful read, because of its subject matter. Wheelaghan’s book reminds us that in the end, there is only a common humanity, and that the accident of being born in specific times and places exerts pressures and forces on individuals, sometimes way beyond what humanity can suffer, without breaking and damage.
Those of us lucky enough to be born in less demanding times, less demanding places, may not always realise how lucky we are, never to have had our own humanity challenged beyond its breaking point.
In many ways, this is as much an account of this reader, and her response to this book, as it is about the book itself. I tried, I really tried, to hold a position as a kind of observing, dispassionate reader, to be able to make some kind of assessing of the writing, the story, the narrative, to do the comparisons to this or that other writer. But, in the end, the ‘about’ of the book, and the personal place from which it came from for the author, and the personal place from which I read it, as a reader, precluded that kind of distance.
So I can’t offer the kind of analysis which might help any other potential reader know if it’s a book which they will want to read, and whether the ‘authorial voice’ will speak to them, and whether the style will be real for you, or not. It clearly all was so for me. 
Go take a look inside, as we can happily do, on the Amazons, and make your own decisions! But as you will see, the reviews (pretty well all very positive) seem to suggest that the powerful effects felt by me, were also experienced by others. And if some of the criteria for ‘good writing’ IS that we are engaged, involved, made to think, to care, and perhaps, even to be transformed or extended in some way, then The Blue Suitcase seems to have done all of that for other readers too.
What a terrific blog post. I downloaded the book and am looking forward to reading it. You gave such a good background to the book, Lady. By the way, the second link is to Amazon/US, but it is marked Amazon/UK. You might want to go back in and correct it, but most people reading this blog will guess at it’s true link destination!
Thank you Jill – also for pointing out my typo. I will go and amend it, after finishing this comment.
I do think it is one which will resonate and speak to you. I’m still thinking about it, 3 or 4 books on!
I must read this. My mom lived through that era and I’m about to release Broken Stone…a middle-grade book…set in East Prussia. I wish that growing up as an immigrant in Canada I had access to the ‘enemy’ point-of-view. Instead, I grew up ashamed and ignorant about my heritage. Books like these, showing the enemy as human, help us gain perspective. Thanks for guiding me to The Blue Suitcase!
I can’t remember which pundit provided the truth that ‘history is written by the victors’ . It seems to me that our whole sorry history of conflict arises out of wounds, bitternesses that go back generations. We are always needing to find fault with ‘the other’, whoever that other is. Call me a cynic, or perhaps a realist, but I don’t believe the majority of us, growing up in different times and places and different histories, would behave any differently from the people we might consider ‘the enemy’ who grew up in THEIR times and places. Nation States indoctrinate their citizens, and even in democracies there are vested interests to manipulate our thinking – the media has its own agenda. And every country has its own version of ‘correct thinking’ which we are raised to adhere to
I hope your book does well Gabe
Great review! It is always difficult reviewing a book of someone you ‘know’, whether you’ve liked the book or not. I understand why authors get ‘out there’ online to try to make connections with readers and reviewers but sometimes I think it can backfire – I’m often more reluctant to read a book if I’ve had contact with the author than if I haven’t. It’s another reason I prefer to read traditionally published rather than self-published books – it provides a layer of separation. However, this one sounds just your sort of book indeed, so I’m very glad you enjoyed it!
Not to mention the fact this wasn’t self-published, and Marianne had no idea I was reading the book. And Amazon’s helpful ‘Look Inside’ meant I could sample style and subject before going for the full buy and download. And, yes, I did have that nervousness.
As someone who has always tried to connect with the ambiguities of being human, one element of black-and-white thinking I held was the horror of Nazi actions in the Holocaust. A particularly powerful personal symbol, was the idea of the slippery slope where ordinary folk may find they are some part of monstrous actions towards others if they allow themselves seemingly small moral transgressions earlier in the process. Of course, as with any black and white thinking, there was some negative slippage in my own attitudes toward Germany as a nation. And then life, as it wonderfully does, caught up with me, and since my children’s paternal great-grandfather was a (non-Nazi) officer in the German war effort, I had to deepen and dapple my thinking. So, thank you for this review, Marianne’s book will contribute to my life-long pondering of this most complex and challenging of times.
Yes, that’s why her book is so powerful. Look around the world and we are all, in so many ways, caught in black and white thinking and the politics of good and bad. How to condemn actions and events whilst trying to comprehend why they arose, and not get trapped into demonising all the peoples of ‘enemy’ nations, all the desires for revenge and retribution, is a tough one. Collectively, it i harder than it is for one individual from one ‘ side’ to work to find the humanity in another individual, just like them, from another ‘ side’
Yes, and there is also the challenge of both taking responsibility for acting to right the present consequences of damaging actions undertaken by our ancestors and also not being disabled by guilt or disconnecting ourselves from the past entirely. I remember seeing a documentary where the children and grandchildren of Nazi family members spoke of the complexity of trying to find ways of thinking about and living with what had happened during the war. In NZ, we have the dynamic of being descendants of either those who were wronged (Maori) or the descendants of those who benefited from those wrongs (Pakeha or Europeans) or those who migrated later. It’s a powerful dynamic which influences our country at both political levels (land settlements and compensation to iwi or tribes) and personal levels (working out our own attitudes and stance to these issues). These elements are a profound aspect of our national identity.
That’s a really powerful comment Underrunner. I suspect knowing you are so actively engaged with that really clear dynamic is (or can be, if it is paid attention to) a profound opportunity. An example, I think, of the fact that deep wounds also give rise to the possibility of deep healing. It doesn’t automatically mean that deep healing WILL happen, but the presence of a very obvious, attention grabbing, painful wounding (however that manifests, whether literally a wound in the body, or an individual or collective wound of psyche and culture) makes you notice and pay attention, in the way which a wound which perhaps has been less potent, less challenged or challenging, is easier to ignore, and perhaps builds a layer of scar we are not even aware of, or, worse, gets detritus stuck in it, and begins to fester.
What you say about finding a place where one is neither disabled by guilt, nor disconnected from where that guilt arose from, is the challenge.
Lots of good food for reflection, arising from Marianne’s book, and from the conversations arising from it. I rather hoped that this post would continue to offer additional reflection for me, and for each other, and so it seems to be doing.
What a find! Of course I have not lived through those passages that Europe endured, but my oldest daughter, who lived, breathed and sometimes slept all things about World ll taught me a lot of it. We watched the movies, visited The Holocaust Museum, the Japanese-Americans interned on American soil…There are still many questions, and no solution to prevent it happening again.
Yes, that is what is most scary. Fearing how we are somehow compelled into perpetuating our errors.
I’m currently reading a marvellously warm and humane, but, because of its subject matter, deeply depressing history book written for children – Gombrich’s A Little History of The World. War, after war, since classical times, followed by rebellion, uprisings, new victors, new losers, new peoples desiring autonomy, control, retribution or domination, and on it seems to go, down the generations. Of course there are advances, of course there are also positive changes, more enlightened thinking, steps forward, incrementally. And then some ancient or current cruelty ferments again, and on it goes.
HI LL and everyone else … I’m really glad I didn’t know you were reading The Blue Suitcase as I’d have also felt awkward somehow. But as you did read it, I am very glad you found it so interesting and hugely appreciative of this review here and on Amazon. In writing The Blue Suitcase I wanted to try and recreate the range of emotions I felt when I read Mum’s documents (and the information I later discovered from the research I carried out), some of which were shock, horror, sadness, bewilderment, anger and especially a lot of guilt. When I was growing up it felt a sort of uncomfortable having a German mum. It wasn’t a very conscious feeling but it was there ie: that doubt that Mum could have been a baddy – ’cause all Germans were baddies when we were growing up, weren’t they? Mum was also a private person and never talked about her family in Germany or what her life was like – and we never asked. To add to this sense of confusion about who she was, the one piece of information we had about mum was that she was from Silesia, yet Silesia didn’t exist on any school atlas we could find. When I discovered the documents and read what had happened to Mum and her family (my family) and to so many other ordinary Germans I felt terrible that I could have thought my mum could have ever been a bad person – I stress, these are feelings I had as child not as an adult, but I remember then and feel guilt at having had them. And then there’s the guilt at not knowing why Mum was unhappy – which she seemed a lot of the time. Although a very pragmatic, capable and giving mother, she rarely smiled. I felt ( and I think my siblings did too) that somehow we were responsible for that unhappiness. As i grew older I discovered that what I perceived to be “unhappiness” was a kind of melancholy due to depression, which Mum suffered from along with insomnia. I still assumed somehow that I was responsible for these illnesses. It was only after Mum’s death that I discovered, through talking to my dad, that Mum had suffered from insomnia and depression from when he’d first met her. This was about the same time I was uncovering her past. This is when I had my first light bulb moment: Mum’s past could have caused her depression. At the same time i thought this, I came across research by the UN that said that while it is vitally important to physically house displaced people who have no home, it was equally important to address their emotional needs. If these emotional needs are not met, long term mental health issues can result. This was my mum, a refugee who, because she was German, and assumed guilty, was denied the opportunity to talk about losing her family and home under terrible circumstances. She was judged, even by me as a child, and others, simply because of her nationality. I wrote The Blue Suitcase to write the wrong that I had committed in believing my mum could be anything other than she was a kind, loving person. I also wrote it because I wanted her story to be told. It was about time.
I think I’ll leave it at that for now. Apart from to day, thanks, again, for your thoughtful, honest, heartfelt review. Oh, one last thing. Why a fiction and not a history? You are right, I was too close for a history. For months I was immobilised by emotion. No matter how many times I started to sit down and write, I couldn’t. Then one day I was at a talk at Edinburgh Uni by Philippa Gregory. Someone asked her why she wrote stories and not histories and she said she thought more people read stories than histories and as she wanted as many people to read her books as possible, she wrote stories. ( I’m not sure if this is true any more, to be honest, creative non fiction or narrative non-fiction is a burgeoning genre, but anyway … ). I had another epiphany: I wanted as many people as possible to read mum’s story and so i decided to write a fiction… based on the facts. By creating a fiction, based on the truth, I could both distance myself from the events, and shape them into a story which people might want to read.
Am definitely going now… oops, one very, very last thing, really 😉 I recently received a lovely letter from a German reader. I thought you may like to read it too. Not because I want to show off somehow, but so you know it isn’t just us Brits who appreciate the telling of this story.
“That part of history – the displacement of millions of people after WW II – has always been quite delicate: the Germans that had been expelled were (and partly still are) considered right wing or revanchist when they mourned the loss of their Heimat in 1945/6. The whole subject, i.e. Germans being victims at the end of a war Germans had begun, is still difficult to discuss neutrally. The question is always if Germans have the right to stress their own losses – or if they had better be quiet because they started the war. Anyway: even though we are interested in European and German history, that part was a rather blank page to us.
Now it is not blank any more. You have written an amazing book that describes a lot of parallel or contradictory developments at the same time. You deliver a lot of different perspectives and thus a quite refined picture – and you leave the judgement to the reader. I agree: the Nazis ruined a lot of souls even before the war (like Toni’s), and their educational, mental terror has had a long term effect on German society. (I mean authoritarian tendencies that slowly disappeared only in the 70s and 80s. I don’t mean the idiots that set fire to refugees’ homes in Germany now. That’s a slightly different though also terrible story, I think.)
We read your moving book during our summer holiday in Poland, which made its impact even stronger. It was our first trip there (well worth it!) and since you can hardly avoid travelling to or through regions that used to be part of Germany, we were often confronted with history. (We didn’t visit Breslau by the way although they say it has been beautifully rebuilt.) And we heard more stories of expulsion: with Polish and Ukrainian victims. So I would basically like to say thank you for that beautiful book.”
Thank you so much for this honest recounting, Marianne, and opening up the background to The Blue Suitcase a little more.
oops and sorry, that should be LF and not LL – grrr!!!
It’s so annoying not to be able to edit your own typos unless you are the blog owner!
Your review sounds like you were too close to time, place and dilemma to review the Blue Suitcase objectively. But I have no background as a child of recent European immigrants. During the 1930’s by parents were just reaching adulthood in rural US, marked heavily by depression. The encroaching war was distant, and my dad fought in the Pacific theater. Do l need a personal connection with the rise of Fascism to understand the Blue Suitcase? Would it not have any appeal to me because I am not the child of displaced Germans? Before I launch into this book I want to know if it was written with the qualities that allow it to speak to a person of another culture, that has no previous insight into a time that led to the fall and breaking of many people.
Absolutely knlistman. I have been interested in reading reviews on Amazon from people who don’t have any kind of personal history – and, curiously I find the same strengths and powerful responses being expressed by readers, which rather shows me that this works as a strong novel, in its own right