But not everyone can draw a stark line between innocent and guilty. Marianne hates the Nazis with the clear moral disgust she levied at them from the beginning. Marianne rescues both: Benita had passed from soldier to soldier, ultimately becoming the hollowed-out, kept woman of a Russian commander in Berlin, while Martin is lodged in a Nazi home for the blameless children of traitors. Her first order of business is to track down Benita, Connie’s young wife, and their son, Martin. Though what she was supposed to do with it remained opaque.”Įventually, she decides she will seek out the widowed survivors and host them in the drafty, leaky castle owned by the family of her aristocratic husband, Albrecht. “She was the last man standing, the decoy left holding the key. When the men first decide to resist Hitler, her beloved friend Martin “Connie” Fledermann dubs Marianne the “commander of wives and children.” His title smarts like a slap, she thinks, but after the plot fails and the men are all executed, Marianne understands her assignment differently.
Marianne von Lingenfels anchors this women’s reconstruction effort. When armed hostilities cease, they face the monumental task of starting over in a Germany still bitter with conflict. After a failed plot against Hitler, the plotters’ widows and orphans stumble through the wreckage of their lives.
War certainly haunts the protagonists of Shattuck’s wise third novel, The Women in the Castle.
It’s a tragic truth, to which Jessica Shattuck might add that even when a war is over, its participants still cannot withdraw. People may go to war when they are ready, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, but they cannot always withdraw when they like.
0 kommentar(er)
