Eva's Cousin
- Book Review,
by Sibylle Knauss
Amazon.com
Eva Braun's cousin, Gertrude Weisker, was 20 years old when she played companion to Braun at the Berghof, Hitler's Bavarian aerie. Weisker kept silent about her time as a Nazi houseguest until she finally told all to German novelist Sibylle Knauss. Now Knauss has transformed Weisker's memories into the novel Eva's Cousin. While the novel's protagonist, Marlene, is a fictionalized version of Weisker, the rest of the infamous cast travel under their real names: Braun, Hitler, Goering, Speer. It's an odd and sometimes confusing project. As Marlene accompanies Eva through the final days of World War II--the days leading up to Braun's and Hitler's double suicide--we're never quite sure if we're witness to Weisker's memories or Knauss's invention. At its best, though, the book makes a compelling investigation into the mundanity of evil. Hitler is pathologized, but never diminished, as Marlene and Eva and all the rest tiptoe around him, careful not to upset him: "Nothing takes more courage than to disappoint a despot. Should he ever discover that free human beings with free will exist, it would surely be the death of him." Knauss cleverly counters Marlene's postadolescent musings with the mythically terrible world she inhabits: "I feel so lonely in Hitler's teahouse," she tells us. And "The only person who did understand me was Albert Speer." These juxtapositions indict Marlene for her very innocence, and make Eva's Cousin a powerful document of witness. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
In the sweltering summer of 1944, Germany's citizens were trapped between the Allied bombing raids and the fear-driven virulence of Hitler's faltering government. But for 20-year-old Marlene, invited by her cousin, Eva Braun, to stay at Hitler's mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, the summer was one of sexual and social awakening. Marlene is initially blinded by the unaccustomed luxury, but she turns out to be both sensible and sensitive. While she has an affair with an SS officer, she also hides a young Russian boy who has escaped the work camps. Based on interviews with Braun's real cousin, the novel is a sympathetic portrait of an innocent girl who, while she seems ensconced in the heart of the Nazi empire, is actually a resistance force of one. An older, disenchanted Marlene looks back on these events and says that the entire country was steeped in guilt and shame: "We remember gray-faced people whom we saw passing by, and we remember that we saw them in the knowledge that they were lost." When Knauss implies that Marlene's experience can explain mass support for the Nazi regime, the moral center of the book falters, but her sparely poetic and intense portrait of a young girl caught between her own ethical code and the promise of power is unrelentingly powerful. A bestseller in Germany, the narrative is adeptly translated by prize-winning Anthea Bell, who has also rendered W.G. Sebald's works into English; it may well make Knauss's international reputation. Readers must judge for themselves whether the protagonist's description of her family as outspoken anti-Nazis is revisionist history, but her memories of Hitler and his entourage are bound to excite interest.real-life protagonist of this novel, Gertraud Weisker, waited until after his death to tell her story to veteran German novelist Knauss.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-In the stifling summer of 1944, Marlene, 20, is invited by her older and more worldly cousin to join her at a mountain retreat. The cousin is Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's mistress, and the retreat is the Berghof, his villa in the Bavarian Alps. At first, she is awestruck by the luxury and pristine setting of her surroundings. As she tries to understand Eva, who changes her clothes several times a day and thinks nothing of having baskets of shoes, she becomes disillusioned, seeing her as shallow, self-absorbed, and detached from reality. Marlene battles boredom, studies physics, and commits two acts of defiance that open her eyes to chilling events taking place not far from their idyllic refuge. As she listens to the BBC and saves a young Ukrainian boy who has run away from a work camp, she realizes that her sheltered world on the mountain is an illusion. This novel is based on the memories of Gertrude Weisker, Braun's cousin, as told to the author. Though Weisker is fictionalized as Marlene, the Nazis are referred to by their real names. Knauss raises important and compelling questions about complicity. Even though the writing occasionally jumps back and forth in time, the story is engaging and helps make this period of history accessible to readers. YAs will find Marlene's tale intriguing as it unfolds against the backdrop of sinister events.Susanne Bardelson, Arvada Public Library, COCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Gertrude Weisker promised her husband never to speak of the time she spent as Eva Braun's companion in 1944. After he died, Gertrude revealed her story. Knauss, a German novelist and academic, has transformed the banal facts of a light friendship between two cousins into a novel "for readers who know and respect the mystery of fiction." The mystery may arise from separating out what Weisker really thought and felt in those days long ago from what Knauss might have added to make this a compelling wartime novel. Not all readers will be convinced that the Gertrude character, Marlene, hid a fugitive Ukrainian in her private dwelling at the Bavarian villa where Eva awaited Hitler's phone calls from the front. However, few will doubt that over the intervening 57 years the real Gertrude burnished her experiences and with Knauss as her voice (and in Bell's inspired translation) produced a work of painful honesty and chilling revulsion. Passing through the sieve of conscience, Weisker's camouflaged recollections reveal that these girls in their summer dresses were part of the German juggernaut of destruction. First published in Germany, this intimate narrative will garner a great deal of attention in the States as well. For most historical fiction collections.Barbara Conaty, Library of CongressCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Knauss' first novel to be translated into English is based on her interviews with Gertrude Weisker, the cousin of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun. Gertrude, called Marlene in the novel, tells the story of her days with Eva at the Bergof, Hitler's mansion in the Bavarian mountains, toward the end of World War II. In 1944, Marlene travels to the Berghof to keep Eva company while Hitler makes his final stand. She becomes caught up in Eva's luxurious world, and the ease with which she can turn a blind eye to the horrors of the war. But when Marlene moves into Hitler's teahouse and discovers a Ukrainian boy named Mikhail who has just escaped from a brutal work camp, she can no longer hide from the realities that are rapidly closing in on her. Elegantly told, Knauss' thought-provoking novel explores Marlene's conflicted thoughts about her cousin, the war, and the SS officer who becomes her lover. Both passively complicit and helpless, Marlene is nonetheless a character who commands the reader's sympathy and interest. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“An intimate portrait of two women at the center of history and how innocence itself can be a crime against humanity. My book of the year.”
—LINDA GRANT
Orange Prize-winning author of When I Lived in Modern Times
From the Hardcover edition.
Review
?An intimate portrait of two women at the center of history and how innocence itself can be a crime against humanity. My book of the year.?
?LINDA GRANT
Orange Prize-winning author of When I Lived in Modern Times
From the Hardcover edition.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
From the Inside Flap
Berchtesgaden, Germany, is a beautiful place, set among the gentle meadow-clad hills rising to the sheer heights of bare Alpine peaks. It is here where an elderly woman arrives and recollects her past—and her peripheral role in a chapter of world history. She walks along a beaten path, which has come into being because so many tourists have ventured this way . . . to see something that exists only in her memory.
In the summer of 1944, twenty-year-old Marlene is thrilled when her older, more glamorous cousin, Eva Braun, Adolph Hitler’s mistress, invites her to come to the Fuhrer’s Bavarian mountain retreat. Against her father’s wishes, Marlene accepts, and immediately sets forth to Berghof.
There, while Hitler is away desperately trying to turn the tides of war, Marlene finds herself in a strange paradise, a world of opulence and imminent danger, of freedom and surveillance. The two women sneak off and skinny-dip in a nearby-lake, watch films in the Fuhrer’s private cinema, and flirt with the SS officers at the dinner table—one of whom will become Marlene’s first lover.
Initially delighted by Eva’s attentions, Marlene later tries to understand the elusive connection between her cousin and the man she loves.
In quiet defiance, she begins to commit her own acts of subversion, which include listening to BBC radio broadcasts, forbidden by the Fuhrer. But a clandestine mission of mercy will force her to question her allegiance to both her cousin and her country—and to face the chilling reality that exists outside her sheltered world.
Based on the true experiences of Eva Braun’s cousin, Gertrude Weisker, who has shared her memories with Sibylle Knauss after more than fifty years of silence, Eva’s Cousin is a novel that illuminates the banality of the domestic face of evil. It casts a special light on the profound questions of innocence and complicity that still haunt much of the world today.
From the Hardcover edition.
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