The German House by Annette Hess
This novel was first published in German in 2018 under the title Deutsches Haus, and returns to one of the central themes of modern German literature – that sense of collective or ancestral guilt for the Second World War and the Holocaust.
It’s 1963 and the German Economic Miracle is transforming West Germany. At the same time, former Nazi officials are being tried for mass murder. A trial opens in Frankfurt to deal with those who had operated at Auschwitz. Witnesses are called, many of whom only speak Polish, so a young woman called Eva Bruhns is recruited to do translation work. Her parents own a small restaurant – kind, unpretentious people who have given her a good upbringing - and she has a rich boyfriend called Jurgen Schoormann.
It’s hard to give a taste of the plot without spoiling the story, but there is an undercurrent of social observation that conveys the tension between the traditional role of the German married woman – kinder, kuche, kirche – and the first signs of social and sexual liberation, as well as a casually expressed but entrenched racism, despite the horrors of the recent German past. This again is something that many Germans who came of age in the 1960’s would confront and challenge, as they would the world over.
In respect of the issues it deals with, The German House calls to mind the The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth, although it’s a very different kind of book. They are both set in Germany in 1963, and during the course of the novel, the Nazi past comes to dominate the personal choices of one person of empathy and conscience.
Submitted by Corwyn
