The final book on the shortlist turns out to be the best – a short, shocking account of the wife of Joseph Goebbels, who killed their six children
The Magda of this slim novel's title is Magda Goebbels, the wife of Joseph, known for a while as the First Lady of the German nation, and the mother of six children, each one of whom she killed.
The facts surrounding this murder are obscure. It took place in the final days of the war, in Hitler's bunker, where there were perforce few surviving reliable witnesses. Some say she did it alone, others that a doctor was brought in to help, but it's clear that she planned it. Most leading Nazis had spirited their children away from danger, but Magda and Joseph brought theirs to Berlin, knowing that they were going to kill them. It's also known that six small bodies were found in the bunker, wearing night clothes, with ribbons carefully tied in their hair.
How could Magda Goebbels do such a thing to her own children? We'll never really know. In an afterword, Meike Ziervogel stresses that in telling this story she hasn't tried for "historical accuracy" so much as attempt to capture "the psychology of the characters". So we don't necessarily get the real Magda Goebbels. But we do get a thorough investigation of a woman who drugs the milk of the children who depend on her for safety. Who breaks cyanide capsules into the mouths of five of them, when they are sleeping. And who forces the capsule into the mouth of the sixth, because she is awake, and struggles against her. That's quite enough.
Six weeks ago, when reviewing Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, I moaned about the "banality of evil dictators" and the difficulty of conveying anything that feels new about notorious figures such as Hitler and Eva Braun. In spite of all her talent and experience, Atkinson struggled to suggest anything I didn't feel I had read or seen before. Magda is entirely different. Plenty of the essentials of the story have been frequently told (most notably in Downfall, not to mention other recent novels like Emma Craigie's Chocolate Cake With Hitler). Yet, I still felt as though I was getting a new perspective. Ziervogel doesn't in any way condone or forgive her version of Magda, but she does present her as a human being and gives fresh insight into this damaged psyche, not to mention into broken mother-daughter relationships, fanaticism and how it feels to get caught up in appalling circumstances.
At the start of the novel, we see Magda lying to her children, telling them they are going on a "family outing" when really they are about to set off for the Führerbunker. We see her watch her husband raise his hand against her eldest daughter for doubting this story, and do nothing. We see her as we essentially feel she must be: cold and cruel. Ziervogel never significantly alters this image, but she does give it depth and colour – and so widens and deepens the horror.
We may never like Magda, but as Ziervogel presents different viewpoints on this woman's nasty, brutish and short life, we feel a shiver of understanding. There's a real sense of a developing character, as a god-like narrator describes her at convent school, learning the facts of life, watching her schoolmates choose victims and bully them – to death. Her coldness is made yet more comprehensible as her mother tells an interviewer after the war about her own chaotic love life and career, along the way revealing her self-regard and dislike of her child Magda. (I was going to write "her child, poor Magda", but that isn't quite right. We never quite feel sorry for her.) We see, too, how easy it was for her to fall into Nazism and to get to know Hitler, thinking about Him in capital letters, marrying to please Him, provoking Him into anger by questioning his actions in the war, "longing for this storm to arrive, hoping that she will be tossed aside by it, overwhelmed, so that she no longer needs to think for herself and can thus be released from all responsibility". As we move in on the inevitable climax, as well as this uncomfortable empathy, there's a growing sense of claustrophobia, darkness, doom. The dread grows all the stronger as we read extracts from Magda's eldest daughter Helga's personal diary: pages that seem all the sadder for being silly, dreamy and romantic. For being, in other words, a convincing approximation of an innocent child growing into womanhood – or not growing into womanhood. The next section shows how Helga was denied this chance, how her own mother killed her. It's a passage of almost unbearable intensity and intimacy, focusing relentlessly on the 12-year-old daughter, while chopped, curt sentences and repetition amplify the horror: "tears are streaming from Helga's eyes, running down her cheeks and wee is flowing between her legs. Warm tears and warm wee run out of her".
This is powerful writing and a truly shocking climax, even if we already know how it turned out. I never had the feeling of retreading old ground. I felt, instead, that this book was taking me to new places I didn't really want to go – and I admired it all the more for that. Sometimes the intensity slackened. A section outlining Magda's fears for her children didn't quite ring true, for instance. But more often this slim, horrible book left me staring and breathless. I'd say it's the best on the Not the Booker shortlist by some distance.
• Next week: excitement. Voting will begin and we'll also be naming our panel of judges. Stand by for drama, confusion, enlightenment and the quest for a winner.
0 comments:
Post a Comment