Breakaway Books

Authored by Jessica Shattuck; Published in 2017; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

The Women in the Castle may be the first historical fiction novel I’ve read centered around privileged women in Germany during the Second World War and how they picked up the pieces after the war. It was not as brutal as many of the WWII novels I read, but it did lend a new perspective on national memory and regret.

In The Women in the Castle, Marianne’s husband begins to plot resistance against the rising fascist Hitler at the outset of WWII, and she is forced to promise that she will work to protect the wives and children of all the conspirators. At the end of the war, her promise comes due, and Marianne finds herself accompanied by Benita, Ania, and their children, trying to survive Germany as it is overrun by the Soviets. As the years pass, Marianne sticks resolutely to her strong moral values. She believes in remembering precisely what Germany did and punishing those Germans who did not defy the Nazis—remembering her husband and his compatriots. But her strong spirit may cost her all of the connections she has left.

Marianne is not the easiest heroine to sympathize with. She may, in fact, embody the opposite of emotional intelligence, seemingly unable to detect the feelings and desires of others, or at the very least, unable to consider them. She is lauded for her moral courage during the resistance, but by the end of the novel, she has also identified that her particular morality is well-suited to large scale geopolitical conflicts—and extremely poorly suited to individual relationships. Her ability to judge so harshly the decisions of the only two adult friends she has after the war was shocking to me, a version of cancel culture decades before its time. She serves as a stunning to contrast to both Benita and Ania, whose decisions during the war were not quite as principled. 

Unlike Marianne, Ania had joined the Nazi party early and in the beginning reveled in the outdoor excursions that the party encourages. The author masterfully depicts her growing horror and the exact point in time when she realizes that she simply must escape—from her party membership and her husband. Benita, though married to an ardent resister before the war, falls in love with an ex-Nazi, marriage with whom Marianne refuses to permit. I admit, Marianne’s handling of this situation struck me as incredibly invasive. Eventually, it is Benita’s fiance who calls the nuptials off, haunted by his past and Marianne’s reprimand. Is Marianne right? Should Benita insist on someone with a purer past? Or is the regret that the man has for his actions during the war enough? All three women struggle with how much to remember about the war and how much to impart to their children.

The Women in the Castle isn’t really a war novel so much as a remembrance and reconciliation novel. It lingers on the grey areas of morality, so it is certainly not an easy read—rather, one to challenge your sense of right and wrong.