Review at a Glance
- Title: The German House
- My Rating: 4
- Genre: Historical Fiction
- Format: eARC*
- Publication Date: December 31, 2019
- Author: Annette Hess
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Book Blurb
Set against the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963, Annette Hess’s international bestseller is a harrowing yet ultimately uplifting coming-of-age story about a young female translator—caught between societal and familial expectations and her unique ability to speak truth to power—as she fights to expose the dark truths of her nation’s past.
If everything your family told you was a lie, how far would you go to uncover the truth?
For twenty-four-year-old Eva Bruhns, World War II is a foggy childhood memory. At the war’s end, Frankfurt was a smoldering ruin, severely damaged by the Allied bombings. But that was two decades ago. Now it is 1963, and the city’s streets, once cratered are smooth and paved. Shiny new stores replace scorched rubble. Eager for her wealthy suitor, Jürgen Schoormann, to propose, Eva dreams of starting a new life away from her parents and sister. But Eva’s plans are turned upside down when a fiery investigator, David Miller, hires her as a translator for a war crimes trial.
As she becomes more deeply involved in the Frankfurt Trials, Eva begins to question her family’s silence on the war and her future. Why do her parents refuse to talk about what happened? What are they hiding? Does she really love Jürgen and will she be happy as a housewife? Though it means going against the wishes of her family and her lover, Eva, propelled by her own conscience , joins a team of fiery prosecutors determined to bring the Nazis to justice—a decision that will help change the present and the past of her nation.
My Thoughts
The German House is a book you read while holding your breath and clutching your stomach, but not out of fear, out of disbelief, disgust, and anger.
Not at the book, but at what was done to the people.
The German House is centered around the story of a young German interpreter for the Nazi trials in 1963. We experience life as she experiences it, are brought along as she discovers that her world is nothing like she thought it was. Some secrets have the power to explode your life, even when they aren’t your own secrets.
I don’t want to give away any spoilers, because I just hate them, but Eva finds that everyone in her life has been keeping secrets. Her countrymen, her sister, her parents, and even her own memory, have been holding back events in the hope that they could make their version of events the truth. But as is almost always the case, the truth is hard to deny when it is take out of hiding and you are forced to look at it.
That is what the Nazi trials did to everyone in the world at the time, none more so than Germans in the 1960’s, whose optimism for the future had clouded the facts of the past. Stepping into Auschwitz, seeing the physical evidence, feeling the weight of millions of deaths, did what no amount of personal testimony could. Forced everyone to stare into the truth until they could see it.
There were multiple parts of The German House that will stay with me forever. The testimonies that Annette Hess wrote from the actual trials, taken with some artistic license to give voices to as many victims as possible, were of course memorable. But a phrase she used stood out and has echoed in my mind.
When talking about Eva, who was trying to repent what her people did to Jews at Auschwitz, someone asked a man who had survived the camp what she wanted. He said, “Consolation. They want us to console them.” It struck me as so true that perpetrators often want consolation in their regret, to make them feel better about the shame they bear for their actions. To think of Jewish people, let only victims of the Holocaust, consoling anyone makes me almost ache with injustice.
The story of Eva herself was a little bit all over the place. I understand that she was finding herself, and her truth, through the trials, and they impacted her view of everything in her life. However, I don’t quite understand how the love story was resolved, especially in the end.
Also, her sister’s storyline makes no sense to me, and I wasn’t able to figure out the purpose of her in the book. I’m assuming there was some hidden meaning or symbolism, but I can’t see it.
Other than those two elements, and a slightly slow start, I loved this book. It brought light to a part of the history of WWII that I was unaware of, and as we all should, I want to know as much as possible. We can never forget because we can never let something like this happen again.
*Special thanks to Annette Hess, HarperVia, and Netgalley for providing a copy of The German House in exchange for an honest review.
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