The central theme of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel, “Somewhere in Germany,” is, as it was in its predecessor, “Nowhere in Africa,” the struggle to feel at home. Once again, it is a goal that eludes almost everyone.
In “Nowhere in Africa,” the Redlich family – Walter, his wife, Jettel, and their 6-year-old daughter, Regina – flee Germany for Kenya in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. It is an excellent story of war, refugees, anti-Semitism and a girl’s maturing and was made into a motion picture that deservedly won the 2003 Oscar for best foreign-language film.
Picking up where that novel left off, “Somewhere in Germany” has the Redlichs, now including baby Max, returning to “the now foreign homeland” in 1947. Germans cannot believe that anyone, much less Jews, would come back to a devastated Germany; the man greeting them in Frankfurt says people have been talking about “the madman who has abandoned the fleshpots of Africa so that he can starve here.”
Just as “nowhere” in Africa is not merely a synonym for obscurity but conveys a sense of not belonging, so is “somewhere” in Germany not merely a metaphor for indetermination, but an indicator of non-rootedness. Frankfurt, where Walter sets up as a lawyer, is a fair distance from their native Upper Silesia, for which he continually yearns.
The yearning is mostly interior. He wants not so much the place as what it once represented. He longs, Regina knows, “for the sounds and memories of home.” She notes in her diary, “It is strange how we all mean something different when we talk of home.”
Regina’s diary entries, which form all of Chapter 2 and never appear again, exemplify the single noteworthy flaw in an otherwise superior novel: a somewhat wobbly point of view. Other than Chapter 2, the novel is told by an unseen narrator, but one whose stance shifts slightly now and then. Though an adult novel, at times it has the charm and simplicity of a good children’s book, especially when the young Regina is front and center.
Besides “home,” other themes are carried over from the earlier novel: Walter and Jettel’s frequent verbal battles, for instance. Though stormy – Jettel rants about his need “to come back to the country of the murderers” – they are expressions of their prickly, yet fierce mutual love.
“Walter was always a dreamer,” Jettel complains to a friend. Walter shoots back: “And you only liked to be where we were not at the moment.”
Jettel is right: Walter has always been a dreamer. Regina knows now she has to “prepare herself to help her father keep the dreams he was unable to give up.”
The bond between father and daughter is tight – and complicated. When after school graduation she takes a job as an entry-level journalist, he both wants her to go and wants her to stay. Walter wants Regina to promise to marry a Jew, though in his innermost heart he does not want her to get married at all – and thus lose her. For her part, Regina seems attracted to older men – father-figures, one might almost say.
Her first sexual experience, initiated by her, is with a 50-year-old, twice-divorced family friend. Later she has an extended affair with her editor, a married man who admits he once was a Nazi.
Still, the Redlichs prosper under the “economic miracle” of postwar West Germany, but not without encountering the occasional expression of “casual” anti-Semitism. A minor official says to Walter, “I always thought the Jews were clever and got through anything.” Responds Walter: “Especially through the chimneys at Auschwitz.”
In the end, only Max, who was not born in Germany, really feels at home there. Max is constantly saying and doing things that are inappropriate and sometimes grotesquely funny, but Walter’s work as a lawyer fascinates him, and he declares that he will become one, too – but a rich one – and will marry a Jewish girl as his father wants.
It is an unhappy fact of our literary life that the “buzz books” get the attention and most other good novels get overlooked. That goes double for works in translation. Having read the German original and English version of “Somewhere in Germany,” I can attest that, like its predecessor, it is both well translated and well worth your time.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
Somewhere in Germany
By Stefanie Zweig; translated by Marlies Comjean
University of Wisconsin Press, 261 pages, $24.95
