A magistral book La Figlia del Reich
by Louise Fein published in Italy by Marsilio.
What a love-story. I can tell you that you'll be completely captured by an engaging narration very well built so that it will be impossible to put this book down.
I went to bed last night with the idea of ending it today but then in the middle of the night I got up for finishing the story. I was too curious!
We are in the city of Lipsia, in Germany and precisely in one of the most beautiful classy mansions of the city; a mansion of a Jewish family but where now live the cheerful nazi family of Hetty; composed by his father mr Heinrich, her mother, her beloved brother Karl, Bertha the cook and Ingrid the housemaid; Hetty is the narrator of this tender, strong and touching story.
When little she was saved by a gentle boy, friend of her brother Karl, because she wasn't able of swimming. Walter Keller is a big companion of Karl and Hetty. Hetty and Karl have a house built in a tree and they love to spend time all together there, playing. Till at the moment in which the racial laws against Jewish people become more hard and Karl decides of breaking the friendship with Walter.
Hetty grows up adoring Hitler considering that his father was an important member of the party. To her Hitler was a God; someone everyone should love for his big qualities and because he wants the best for all its citizens. He fights against Jewish because Jewish want to conquer the world: common people repeat this mantra starting to hate Jewish citizens. People, the Jewish ones of Lipsia who had lived peacefully and completely integrated with the rest of the citizens, Germans more than a German could be, loving and serving their country, exactly as it happend for the French or the Italian Jewish ones. More than a reflection must be done...
When Hetty discovers that Walter is a Jewish, she can't understand.
I found the character of Hetty pretty weird, and sometimes egoistical.
I could not understand her all the times: plus, in a way or another no one of the people who helped her, have had great fortune. You will discover it in the novel.
Sure, let's add this, for trying to give back a good idea of the protagonist: she is confused by a nazis family and the love for Walter, a thinker, someone who opened her eyes: it's impossible in these times of peace that we are breathing, thank Lord, to understand what means living in a state of dictatorship and in particular in the nazis one where a suspect could kill a person. Everyone apparently agreed with the ideas expressed by the dictator, because they couldn't do differently; people would have been killed if discovered of opposed ideas, and no one wanted to lose the skin, for, after all the deficiency or craziness of their leader.
But not everyone supported Hitler and the reality where Hetty lives is not linear but pretty contorted.
His father, his brother, his friends, they are all liars in a way or another: sometimes Hetty won't understand anymore who she can trust anymore.
The irony of all this tale is that after that the dictatorship of Hitler was over, another brutal one, the Communist dictatorship dominated the part of Germany, the East one, where Hetty continued to live, so Hetty breathed what means freedom only after 1989. An entire existence kept prisoner by dictatorships, mamma mia! with freedoms strongly reduced, in particular the possibility of expressing opinions. The positive thing of the Communism party was that it has always given the possibility of studying to its citizens, and so she became who she would have wanted to become when young.
I loved the characters of Bertha, Walter and the one of her friend Erna. The first one, the cook of the family was a gentle woman, Walter is an opened boy, tender, delicate, beauty inside and outside, Erna will be loyal till the end. I hated the characters of Tomas and Ingrid, because they represent the biggest squalor of the existence.
Highly recommended.
I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of La Figlia del Reich.
Anna Maria Polidori
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