RED FLAGS

Debut author McQueen presents a historical novel about a young woman’s childhood and young adulthood in Nazi Germany.

In 1930, Hildegard Applebaum is 12 years old. Her widowed mother, Wilhelmina Appelbaum, is a cabaret performer and occasional sex worker in Berlin. The pair live an exciting but sometimes frightening life that notably lacks stability. Things change in 1931when Hildegard’s mother marries a straitlaced businessman named Otto Richter and the family moves to his farm in the quaint town of Himmelberg. Life there may be a bit slower than it is in Berlin, but the beauty of the Alps can’t be denied. At the local movie theater, Hildegard marvels at films such as director Fritz Lang’s M. However, Hitler’s later rise to power means that films such as The Wizard of Oz are forbidden. It also means a march to war. Hildegard participates in the summer camp-like Jungmädel (“the Young Maidens,” effectively the Hitler Youth for girls), mostly for its sisterlike camaraderie. Around this time, Spanish refugee Miguel Benaroya becomes a helper on Otto’s farm; the young man lost an eye in the Spanish Civil War fighting on the fascist side. As such, it would seem Miguel would fit well into another fascist society, except for the fact that he’s from another country and secretly Jewish. The 28-year-old man and the 21-year-old Hildegard fall in love and try to flee the country together. Then things go very wrong, and Hildegard faces a fate she could not have predicted.

Over the course of the novel, McQueen engagingly highlights the ease with which ordinary people got caught up in the evils of Nazism. Through Hildegard’s perspective, readers see the townspeople of Himmelberg go from ordinary, inoffensive neighbors to “saluting and chanting” acolytes of a new regime. Even new “stainless steel swastika steins” at an inn play a part inushering in a grim new era. Miguel initially thinks he’s safe in Germany; after all, he fought for fascists in Spain, and the townspeople “know me. They ask me to come drink with them.” However, the culture’s commitment to paranoia and intolerance reveal him to be very much mistaken. One drawback to the story is that the portrayals of many of its characters lack nuance; they tend to say exactly what they think and do so in a plain, straightforward way. As one character rather obviously states, regarding the Gestapo, “I hope they don’t come to Himmelberg.” Frequently, statements fail to exhibit much personality or explain what’s happening with a great deal of complexity. Still, the novel does effectively explore different aspects of the Holocaust by highlighting troubling, lesser-known facts (such as that an engineer named Kurt Prüfer designed a four-story crematorium) and showing how many different types of people became victims of the Third Reich. As Hildegard learns all too well, anyone who failed to toe the party line could find their life destroyed in ways that are hard to imagine.

A carefully constructed drama about the terrors of the Holocaust, hampered somewhat by shallow characterization.