‘Wunderland’ a devastating epic tracing Hitler’s rise
When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, he did so through legal means, bolstered by the widespread popularity of the Nazi party. We know now what came after – the monstrosity of the Holocaust – but the genocide started, as genocides do, with dehumanizing rhetoric and policy, mortal danger masquerading until the last stop as mere ideology.
There were eight years between Hitler’s rise to power and the beginning of the Holocaust in 1941, and in that time, Germans turned on their Jewish neighbors. The evil that enabled the coming genocide became commonplace, infecting people who must have considered themselves quite ordinary.
Jennifer Cody Epstein explores this fraught time period in her devastating new novel “Wunderland” (Crown, 384 pp., ★★★☆). Told from three alternating points of view – one with the benefit of hindsight, and two marching through 1930s Germany still hoping for the best – it explores the relationship between two Berlin schoolgirls in the prewar years of the Third Reich.
In New York City in 1989, Ava Fischer learns of her estranged mother Ilse’s death through a letter from a lawyer, who sends Ilse’s remains as well as a sheaf of letters addressed to her childhood friend, Renate Bauer. Ava has never heard of this friend, but then there were a lot of things she never knew about Ilse, a frustrating, stubborn woman who built a wall of secrets between herself and her only child. “(I)n Ava’s mind’s eye her mother was eternally milk-skinned and muscular, goldenhaired and silver-eyed. Above all, overwhelmingly dense.”
The letters hold the answers to some of the questions that have plagued Ava her whole life: the identity of her father; Ilse’s whereabouts at the end of the war, when Ava was left in a German orphanage; who Ilse was and what she did.
Ilse and Renate are teenagers in the first years of Hitler’s regime, and both girls have bought into Nazism to varying degrees. Ilse joins the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth, while Renate dates a strapping young boy with a passion for Jew-bashing and “Mein Kampf.” But when Renate tries to register for the BDM behind her parents’ back, she learns that she is half-Jewish. The discovery comes as a shock to the would-be Nazi: “(H)er mind keeps whirling and swirling, pausing sporadically and only briefly on things she’s seen every day without really registering them: the troops of Brownshirts who swagger their way down the streets (… things) she’d barely noticed because she’d assumed they didn’t apply to her.”
Her mixed blood changes everything, her family coming under siege with the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws. The girls’ friendship shatters as they find themselves on opposite sides of this new Germany: not just because of vague impersonal forces of law and history, but because of Ilse’s individual embrace of fascism.
“Wunderland” is an epic about friendship and family set against an inherently emotional, dramatic backdrop. There are many moments when the narrative could slip into unwarranted optimism and ahistorical triumphs of decency, but every time, Epstein stays the harder path, telling a story that feels tragic and brutal and true.