Motherland

Starred review from October 21, 2013
Fear, grief, and the will to survive fuse in this beautiful novel about the inner life of a German family in the final months of World War II. Inspired by letters written by Hummel’s (House and Fire) paternal grandparents and her father’s childhood in a war-torn Germany, Motherland occupies a relatively unexplored space in World War II literature, in which political sympathies and oppositions are vastly less important than finding enough tinder to keep the children warm or figuring out when to take an ailing child to the doctor. When Dr. Frank Kappus, a widower, is drafted into medical military service, he leaves behind his three sons with their brand new stepmother, Liesl. She does everything within her power to nurture the two grieving boys and the infant now in her care, including stretching their meager rations into filling meals and assuaging their fears of Allied bombings. The job becomes drastically more difficult when two refugee families are moved into the family’s house and six-year-old Ani’s constant stomachaches turn into something far more serious. Frank, working as a reconstructive surgeon 250 km away, is confronted daily with horrific battlefield injuries. The humiliations and guilt that each family member endures for the others are described with grace and humanity in this absorbing story. While stunningly intimate, Motherland is expansive in feeling and scope. Extending beyond a simple historical drama, this book is a reminder of the reach of love, how it can blind, and how it can heal. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary.

Starred review from November 1, 2013
Inspired by family letters, Hummel chronicles the existence of an ordinary middle-class German family in the waning days of the Third Reich. Any author writing about German life during the Nazi regime has one primary challenge: how to address the Holocaust. Or, as Hummel succinctly puts it in her afterword, "What did [my characters] know and when did they know it?" She has opted not to use hindsight to impute either heroic resistance or conscious complicity to her characters. The two principal narrators are Liesl, a kindergarten teacher at a medical spa in the remote town of Hannesburg, and her husband, Frank, a surgeon who married Liesl in haste--mainly since she is good with children--after his first wife died giving birth to son Jurgen. Frank is called to a military hospital in Weimar, where he works as a reconstructive surgeon, repairing horrific battle scars and studying new skin-graft techniques. When a guard from nearby Buchenwald presents symptoms of typhus, Frank is too overworked to ponder conditions at what he thinks is a prison camp for criminals. Back home, Liesl, who once revered Hitler but by now is disillusioned, is preoccupied with keeping her new family fed and safe. Two refugee families are billeted in her house; her oldest son, Hans, is a budding black marketeer; baby Jurgen has a fever; and middle son Anselm has somehow contracted lead poisoning. The Nazi doctor she consults threatens to send "Ani" to the notorious Hadamar asylum if he does not improve. In desperation, she writes to Frank in code, asking him to desert and come home. These characters appear to have, at best, blinders on and, at worse, to be in denial about the fate of their missing Jewish neighbors and what is actually going on at camps like Buchenwald. However, these all-too-human failings are so honestly rendered that a stark question emerges: Who among us, faced with similar circumstances, would have acted differently? Heart-rending and chilling.

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November 1, 2013
A deserter in Nazi Germany, on his way back to his family, hid letters from his new wife in an attic wall, where they were discovered decades later. Those letters led his granddaughter, poet and fiction writer Hummel, to explore the experience of Germans who struggled to keep their lives intact during WWII. Motherland follows Liesl, who recently married Frank, a widower, and is now caring for his three sons while he works as a surgeon stationed elsewhere. With separate struggles, including a debilitating illness striking one of the boys, Liesl and Frank's stories unfold alongside each other but are only loosely connected, highlighting the depth of their separation. The Third Reich exerts a menacing, persistent force from the background. In prose that is both spare and heavily laden with the exhausted emotion of hard living, Hummel maintains a claustrophobic undercurrent of fear even when describing mundane daily tasks. Dark and uncompromising, Motherland illuminates a little-examined aspect of the war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)