"The Women in the Castle" by Jessica Shattuck

When WWI ended people named it the Great War implying that nothing as terrifying would ever happen. Still something even more devastating was to come just in some decades… “The Women in the Castle”,. is about surviving and living on, about the war as seen by those who remained in their homes, still suffered not less than the ones on the front, it’s feminine and feministic as it is written by a woman, and about women, and states that fair sex doesn’t mean minor one or even less strong.

Although this novel deals with war you will not find a single description of battles in it, but it is unbelievable how much violence can be found outside the battlefield. The book is generally not physical and tends to hint at scenes of violence rather than describe them, but if you are not deprived of imagination you will certainly feel all that is implied. The emotional value of the narration is immense.

The story being told in 3rd person narrative, it still remains polyphonic as in each new chapter the author focuses on a new character, introducing a lot of minor ones among these three protagonists. Such technique ensures the sensuality and emotionality with which their stories are narrated and helps to see different points of view on the same situation each time adding new and new details.

The novel is a hard read and hard to write about, but obviously worth reading. The author does a great job explaining how people could have fallen under the spell of Hitler’s assertions and promises and let their own country turn into a hell on earth. Actually, this all may turn out easier than most people believe as not so many German people (especially in rural areas) had received proper education those days which made them much easier influenced, and besides after the Great war and years of poverty and national disunity general public was just glad to embrace any stability proposed, not considering what it may turn out later. Jessica Shattuck gives a lot of examples of people who didn’t realize (or just preferred to shut their eyes to) what the system proposed by Hitler really meant. By the time it transformed from the ideas of national unity and strong healthy youth into open violent racism people generally were too scared for themselves and their children to act against it, while others turned crazy fans of the system, who blindly performed their “duty’. Shattuck describes all kinds of those people leaving for the reader to judge and make opinions about them.

Sadly, as it often happens, only a small percent of population dared to show their protest and even less – to take some actions. And the main character, Marianna, is one of them. And there are two more heroines, Benita and Anya, who aren’t such fighters as their friend but whose stories are worth telling as they too managed to go through the mincer of war and still remain human. Strangers at the beginning they gradually become closer to each other and their relations and twists of their fates compose the plot of the novel.

Some of the most shocking and impressive parts of the book describe the ways of youth camps for Hitlerjugend. Here “The Women in the Castle” remind me of an outstanding British writer, William Golding, and his dystopia “Lord of the Flies”. In fact, even more frightening variant of it, considering that everything was happening in reality. Indeed, everything seems to be very similar to Golding’s island where the boys being physically restricted to a small space feel free in every other way. And, sadly enough, only a few can use this freedom to create something positive while for others it means the freedom of destruction. The main aim of SS camps was to make the boys gradually lose their humanity turning them into beasts good only for killing and humiliating, make them feel themselves gods who are allowed to do anything they want. How far is that from Golding’s hunters? Luckily, both Golding’s and Shattuck’s boys were finally woken up from their illusion of omnipotence, but in both cases for some of the boys it was far too late…

However, the author’s main focus is upon the people who managed to preserve human qualities in all this madness, although no one remained absolutely flawless. Therefore comparing Marianna, Benita and Anya to their children, Jessica Shattuck stated a serious moral dilemma especially topical in any post-war period: to which extent should children be responsible for the deeds of their parents? Are praising children for parents’ achievements and blaming them for their faults two sides of the same coin or two currencies of different value? Eventually the most difficult stage of recovering after the war for all the characters turns out to be forgiveness and not all of them are really able to forgive themselves and the others for what they did… or failed to do.