Food

Food is so important in this novel. Its title suggests that nature’s ability to produce food for us is more important than whatever we humans might choose to quarrel about.

We often ask ourselves how could the Holocaust happen. Is food a clue? A terrible depression hit the world in the 1930s. It was particularly bad in Germany. Some of the Nazi cruelty towards the Jews involved deprivation of food.

Concentration Camps

Concentration Camps are different form Death Camps. As their name suggests, they are where concentrated groups of people were held. Clara Lehrs and possibly Karl Schubert in the Hani strand of our story went to concentration camps.

Neither Renate, Hani nor the other German girls were very aware of what these were or how bad the conditions were in them. They were probably more aware of the idea of a work camp. Renate may have been familiar with these in England too, for some fellow Germans were interned. 

Banned Books in Nazi Germany

The German girls in our story would have been deprived of some reading material. Authors who were banned include such well-known figures as Bertolt Brecht, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Ernest Hemmingway, Erich Kästner, Franz Kafka, Helen Keller, André Malraux, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx Rudolf Steiner, and H.G. Wells amongst many, many others.

Librarians were given a list of criteria for deciding which books should be destroyed: 

Bund Deutscher Mädel - German Girls' Association

Literally, the Union of German Lasses.  

This was the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth Movement.  The German girls don’t mention it at all in their letters. This is puzzling at first because it was actually compulsory. Girls were expected to pay subs and to attend. However, it is highly likely that it was such a part of their life during the 1930s and the 1940s that they didn’t think to mention it.

It plays an important role in Hani’s thread and becomes paramilitary when the girls are asked to set Haus Lehrs on fire in the last desperate weeks of the war. 

Bombings

In our story we read about bombs dropping on Nuremberg and London. There are no actual scenes, except in Renate’s nightmares, where bombs are dropped. We might suppose Renate has experienced them during visits to her mother in London. She was naturally worried about what might be happening to her mother in London, her father in Nuremberg and her grandmother in Stuttgart. It was partly this concern, alongside her confusion about her identity and her overwork, that caused her breakdown.

Actually, all three were spared injury and death from bombs. However, some of the property that Renate and her mother had managed to bring out of Germany was destroyed by an incendiary bomb.     

The Blitz on London began on 7 September 1940. The war had been slow to get started but began to feel real in March 1940. The beginning of the Blitz marked a change in German tactics; they were now prepared to attack British civilians. The Blitz, this intense time of bombing, ended on 11 May 1941. Other bombing raids still happened but they were less intense. 3000 Londoners were killed on the final night of the Blitz.

There are plenty of short films on You Tube to give you an impression of what a raid on London felt like. The Imperial War Museum North sometimes shows 360 degree films of the Blitz.

Nuremberg was in ruins by the end of the war. Two years after the war ended, when Renate went back there, there would still have been more rubble than whole buildings. See here. The most significant raids took place on: 

29 August 1942

26 February 1943

9 March 1943

28 August 1943

30/31 March 1944

3 October 1944

2 January 1945

20 February 1945

16 March 1945

5 April 1945

Kristallnacht

This took place during the night 9-10 November 1938. In the Hani strand of the novel, Hani remembers seeing the aftermath of it during the morning of 10 November. She recalls this when her BDM leader is talking about the enemies of the state – the Jews.

Käthe and Hans Elders’ divorce papers indicate that Käthe left the family home of 15 November 1938. We know that this was not true. Yet it seems a reasonable date to use as this would have been a few days after the Kristallnacht. The fictional Kellermann cake shop is destroyed in our story but reopens after the war.

Kristallnacht is sometimes translated into English as “The Night of the Broken Glass”. Shops and businesses belonging to Jews were ransacked by SA and SS personal and civilians. The Police condoned it. Synagogues were set on fire and whilst fire crews prevented the fires from spreading to neighbouring buildings- so long as they belonged to Aryan Germans – little was done to put these fires out. The fire crew that attends Haus Lehrs in our story show a similar attitude.

 The trigger of the attacks was the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew in Paris. Ernst vom Rath was considered to be quite a mild Nazi who had in fact resisted anti-Semitism. This seemed to add insult to injury in the Nazi’s eyes. The Jews were already having quite a hard time under Nazi rule: the 1935 Nuremberg Laws had already taken many of their rights away. 

The event on 9 November 1938 is well named. It was a night of broken glass – Kristall – but it also crystallised the Nazi attitude. It is often named as the beginning of the Holocaust. One international reaction to the Kristallnacht was the setting up of the Kindertransport. Obviously Hans and Käthe

Edler had given this some thought. Six weeks later they at last told Renate that she was Jewish. Six weeks after that she was on her way to England. 

A lot of the shops could be looted. Who would do that? 

Why do you think the Germans felt so angry about the Jews? 

Was Ernst von Rath's assassination a justification or an excuse? 

Sometimes we are surprised that certain people, ourselves included, actually join in looting parties. Why do people who normally keep to the laws  suddenly start doing something so peculiar?        

     

Enemy Aliens

Both Renate and Käthe Edler were defined as Enemy Aliens, Class B. This meant that they did not have to be interned. They were allowed a certain amount of freedom but they did have some restrictions. They couldn’t travel more than ten miles away from home without special permission, be out after a curfew of 10 p.m. or be near the coast or a munitions factory without special permission. However, this permission was usually granted. Renate really did have a similar incident with a bike to the one in the story.

Renate did not become an “enemy alien” until her sixteenth birthday.

A Class A alien was considered a danger to the state and was interned. This included some of the people who had originally come on the Kindertransport, which is slightly puzzling as many refugees were classified as C – no threat at all. However, several male internees later joined the British forces.

Perhaps it was because Renate and Käthe considered themselves German rather than Jewish that they were not given complete freedom.      

Food for thought: 

Why do you think the rules about what Enemy Aliens Class B could do were made?
How might these rules have affected someone like Renate?
How might it have affected her mother?  (She lived in London for much of World War II.)