Scan barcode
brogan7's review
challenging
emotional
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Stunningly illustrated. Also a complex look at a complex situation.
Irmina is a young German woman who goes to England in the 1930s to learn to be a typist and to make her own living.
She's a bit of an unusual character, she doesn't mix easily or bow to the expected social order of her time.
She meets a Black man from Barbados who is in England to study at Oxford, and they become fast friends and perhaps more. She returns to Germany, with plans to return and reconnect with Howard, but the arrow of history intervenes, and by the time she makes arrangements to go back to England, she has lost touch with Howard...
We expect heroic stories of that time, and this is not a hero's tale. Irmina is an ordinary woman who makes choices that we can read into but not quite know what her thoughts on it were. The book interrogates the responsibility of the individual in a time of widespread horrors. All of Irmina's iconoclasm does not help her rebel against the Nazi regime, and she becomes swept up in it as though it is an ordinary life --as though she is a "normal German."
I had questions, upon finishing reading this book. Did she ever love her husband? Did she feel complicated about the anti-Semitism she saw all around her? Did she feel like the scripts for an undemanding, ordinary life were easier to bow to, in the end, than somehow fighting them alone?
The scholar who writes the afterword is quick to condemn Irmina as having had a choice, and therefore of being reprehensible in some fundamental way, but I thought Barbara Yelin's depiction was more subtle and more compassionate than that, although it seemed short on the exploration of inner contradictions. (The pace in the early thirties is slow and languorous, but it picks up speed just as Irmina is making key life decisions... obviously not Yelin's interest in exploring those motivations, but aren't they key?)
I don't know how I can feel both: that ordinary Germans were reprehensible for their complicity in the genocide, and that for Irmina, it was complicated, it was human. Looking back, you can think, why did she squander her life and her talents? Why wasn't she more like Howard? But I felt something else, something muddier, in the face of this moral dilemma, which is that she chose before she knew what that choice would altogether mean, and that she was a good person who missed connecting with something that would have changed her approach to the horror of the century. And that instead of having contempt for her for that, it's more about... understanding it, without condoning it. It feels complicated, which, in a book about the second world war, a subject so relentlessly revisited--it is good to have something new and uncomfortable and true to look at. Something that specifically doesn't ring old platitudes and make it easy to say, "she was wrong and she is wholly unlike me " which might carry momentary moral satisfaction, but ultimately doesn't help us grow our understanding for a time that defies understanding, just as there are things in our world today that defy understanding, that humans participate in in fantastic numbers.
Irmina is a young German woman who goes to England in the 1930s to learn to be a typist and to make her own living.
She's a bit of an unusual character, she doesn't mix easily or bow to the expected social order of her time.
She meets a Black man from Barbados who is in England to study at Oxford, and they become fast friends and perhaps more. She returns to Germany, with plans to return and reconnect with Howard, but the arrow of history intervenes, and by the time she makes arrangements to go back to England, she has lost touch with Howard...
We expect heroic stories of that time, and this is not a hero's tale. Irmina is an ordinary woman who makes choices that we can read into but not quite know what her thoughts on it were. The book interrogates the responsibility of the individual in a time of widespread horrors. All of Irmina's iconoclasm does not help her rebel against the Nazi regime, and she becomes swept up in it as though it is an ordinary life --as though she is a "normal German."
I had questions, upon finishing reading this book.
The scholar who writes the afterword is quick to condemn Irmina as having had a choice, and therefore of being reprehensible in some fundamental way, but I thought Barbara Yelin's depiction was more subtle and more compassionate than that, although it seemed short on the exploration of inner contradictions. (The pace in the early thirties is slow and languorous, but it picks up speed just as Irmina is making key life decisions... obviously not Yelin's interest in exploring those motivations, but aren't they key?)
I don't know how I can feel both: that ordinary Germans were reprehensible for their complicity in the genocide, and that for Irmina, it was complicated, it was human. Looking back, you can think, why did she squander her life and her talents?
Content Warnings
Moderate: War, Racism, Antisemitism, and Genocide
Tw: Kristallnachtavisreadsandreads's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racial slurs, Antisemitism, Genocide, Racism, and War
Minor: Violence
More...