Book Review: The Woman in the Castle, by Jessica Shattuck

What happens when women’s stories of war are privileged over those of men? In Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck explores the lives of three very different German women during and after World War II: a resister, an at-first true believer and low-level collaborator, and a poor woman who marries up only to have her desired life violently interrupted. While the men were off fighting a war--or fighting those in their country who waged the war--the women stayed home to fight their own battles against hunger, against threats to their children, against the soul-crushing rapists of invading armies, against those who would deny the atrocities their own government and military were inflicting on millions of others, and against their own senses of guilt and shame. Shattuck delves more deeply and thoughtfully into the moral ambiguities of ordinary people living in Nazi Germany than in any other novel I’ve read. (The Book Thief is my other favorite that does this with success.) In the process, she asks us to consider important questions of what it means to be morally right, of what it means to be guilty, and of the role of compassion for imperfect friends in the midst of deciding these questions.

Marianne is a strong, intellectual woman, fortified by logical arguments and the knowledge that she is right about the evil of Hitler and the Nazis. Her husband and childhood friend are part of the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, and she is their helper. She also promises the men that if the plot fails, and they are killed, that she will look after their wives and children. After the war is over, but while the Russians and the Americans are still occupying the country, she manages to find two of the widows and their children. They all come to live in her family’s largely-ravaged castle and need to figure out how to survive, carry on, and live with the after-effects of rapes, executed spouses, and the growing revelations of all their country had done and they and those around them had not done.

The novel also pushes readers to consider the forces that stop people from speaking out and resisting early on, when something might still be done to halt a complete descent into authoritarianism, into genocide. I’m not one for glib comparisons of bad contemporary leaders to Hitler, but that doesn’t mean that politicians with authoritarian personalities and aspirations don’t need to be called out for their assaults on democratic institutions like the ballot, the press, and demonstrations. Looking back through this well-researched fiction to a horrific time, Shattuck shows us numerous people who were yearning for something: community, a return to a better time, a leader to set things right, and so were blinded at first, then willfully ignoring what was there, then often too fearful to act. And, then it was too late. In her depiction of those Germans who thought the posters, news reels, and stories of concentration camps were Allied propaganda, I could see those today who cry “fake news” whenever they come across a story not conforming to what they need to hear about their leader, their political faction. As one character reflects on what she will have to pay for during the rest of her life: “not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face” (337).

The story of these women is a powerful and challenging one, offering a different perspective on Nazi Germany and the effects it had on everyday people. The women have much to teach us.