Earthly Creatures and a visit to Dachau

The distinguished novelist Stevie Davies has just published her latest work called Earthly Creatures, described as a riveting, epic historical novel set in 1940’s Germany. Here she visits dark regions of the past.

Stevie Davies

It’s 1959 and I’m 13. My parents, in the front seats of our Volkswagen, are discussing a problem, sotto voce. Stationed at RAF camps in Germany, they’re keen to see as much of the country as possible. I’m in the back with my head in a book, not paying much attention.

We’ve seen something of Munich on this trip. Where are we going now? Frankly I’m not bothered. It’s the holidays and I’m free of my hated British Forces boarding school in Schleswig-Holstein. I’m not alerted till my father says, quietly but passionately, She should go, Mon. It’s the right thing. She must know.

Where should I go? What should I know?

My mother comes straight back with, No, Harry, she’s too young. She’s sensitive enough already. She’ll have nightmares.

Nightmares

It turned out we were going to Dachau, the extermination camp, nightmares or no nightmares. My father held the steering wheel rather tightly, in more ways than one. Men did, in those days. He’d fought in the War, in the Western Desert and then up through Italy to Rome and Naples.

He’d brought home a pumice stone from Pompeii which we used to clean our dirty hands. What horror my father had seen in Cyrenaica and across Europe he never divulged in so many words – but it preyed on him all his life. Now that we were stationed in Germany, he occasionally looked at people with a strange wistfulness, as if to say: But you are so lovely and kind – how could you corporately have behaved like that?

Dachau: I remember the straight road to the camp and the sign Arbeit Macht Frei. Huts near the gate astonished me because folk seemed to be lodging there. A woman was hanging clothes on a line. In those days the camp was informally open to visitors but not yet a site of mass pilgrimage. I remember the mountain of shoes. The heaped shorn hair. The photographs. The crematorium. My mother saying, Don’t look, don’t look.

But I looked.

In the mute aftermath, as we drove away from the camp, I remember pondering my father’s hands on the wheel and wondering: had those hands ever personally killed anyone? It’s not very likely because Sergeant Davies was an aircraft fitter.

He asked me to bear witness and that has come to seem a sacred trust. But what I witnessed in Germany in my teens was not quite what he would have expected or perhaps approved. At the British Forces boarding school in Northern Germany I lived in a state of terror and home-sickness. Bullying was rife, from the British children and staff, on what I grew to call the Schweinhund principle. For from the window of a flat we’d briefly occupied in Hildesheim, I’d seen British kids stoning German children, shouting Schweinhund! Schweinhund! A testament to our superior civilization as a self-appointed master-race, the winners, the goodies.

I lived in fear of my Schweinhund-shouting compatriots. And I think they lived in fear of one another, possibly a worse because sublimated fear. Maybe even then I vaguely wondered: Are we really so very different? How would we have behaved under comparable pressures to the Germans of the 1930s and 40s? We British were tainted with racism, misogyny, snobbery, jingoism. And above all we were self-righteous. It’s a curious paradox that my military background turned me into a pacifist. My father was understandably aghast when I came home from university with a CND badge.

Compromised

A major theme of my novels, especially the two set in Germany, The Element of Water and Earthly Creatures, and Into Suez in Egypt, is that we are all, without exception, compromised. Our personal history is a tiny arc. At the point where we glimpse its connection with the great cycle of history, there may come a moment of illumination; we discern a pattern so much larger than ourselves. I don’t mean a revelation or anything dramatic like that. I mean a match struck in the dark.

Decades later I discovered by chance that the buildings that housed our school, previously a Nazi naval centre, had been the scene of the hand-over of ‘Imperial’ power after Hitler’s suicide on 30^th April 1945. Here Grand Admiral Dönitz and the rump of the armed forces had fled as the Allies advanced, to establish an HQ.

Here the admiral had been named Hitler’s successor. Imagine: he receives the phone receiver from a minion, informed that there’s an important call from High Command; he learns that the Führer is dead and that he, Karl Dönitz, is the new head of state. Of a ruined Reich. Goering and Himmler had betrayed their Leader. But Hitler trusted Dönitz as an old-school military lickspittle who would never break his oath.

The match was struck for me. We children had always known of course that German sailors had slept in our dormitories and eaten in our refectory. We’d inherited their mattresses, each split into three military ‘biscuits’ that came apart in the night. We didn’t give our manly predecessors much thought at the time. We were postwar babies. Our teachers liked to punish us for talking after lights-out by making us crawl up and down the corridor in a line in our nightgowns.

We crawled until we cried. We never thought of the high officers of the Kriegsmarine swaggering along those corridors, the swastikas, the salutes, the military palaver. And then all of a sudden, many years later, I did. A tiny piece of information brought it all to life. A kind of aerial view of the Reich in ruins, the British Empire in its final hurrah: an admiral who’d be in power for 23 days advancing down a corridor where later would crawl the humiliated daughters of another crumbled empire, far from home.

Tragic

The Element of Water is the testament of the girl who went to Plön. Earthly Creatures tries to speak for the child who visited Dachau. I read histories, memoirs and diaries. Read enough and you live in those imagined and often tragic beings. You are no longer a 21^st century British woman reading about 1940s Germans under Nazism, you are a fellow human being learning of the fungal rot that grows inside ordinary persons under authoritarian regimes; the ambivalence you might fall into; the self-serving lies and delusions; the daunting courage that is necessary to be a dissident in a terror-state.

As I wrote the character of Magdalena, I came to feel inseparable from her. She was in a sense a second-generation victim of Dachau. In 1933 – before the book opens – her father, Max Arber, the dissident scholar and humanist, had been arrested, taken into ‘protective custody’ and sent to Dachau concentration camp where he’d received ‘re-education’ and a broken leg. He’d never been the same since.

When in 1941 nineteen-year-old Magdalena prepares exultantly to leave home for her teaching post in East Prussia, Max is desperate to advise her. But how? His advice must be a contradiction in terms. He counsels her: ‘Don’t let them corrupt your language. 

The inner language you speak to yourself.’ But on the other hand she must never, never speak it aloud, she must mouth the required platitudes. ‘I am saying, do as I say, not as I once did.’ Hedged around with dangers, Magdalena Arber has to learn for herself along the way. She unlearns her indoctrination and manages a measure of resistance. But Magda is always subject to the inner conflict and ambivalence that attend the decision to refuse official lies. And in this double bind she draws tenderly nearer to Max, over whom the shadow of Dachau hangs throughout the story. When her father is arrested for a minor breach of regulations, she understands all too well his predicament – from the inside:

But my father, she thought. Her heart twisted in her chest. Dad, arrested. She saw him in the police cell, minus his braces. Nothing was more important than getting home to him, and saying,’I see now, Dad, I am beginning to see.’

Stevie Davies’ novel Earthly Creatures is published by Honno. It is available from all good bookshops.