I don’t think I’ve ever seen the divide between idealism and pragmatism laid out as starkly as I did in Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle. The three women in this novel get caught on the outskirts of the July 20 Plot, in which Claus von Stauffenberg and other German aristocrats attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Marianne von Lingelfels, Benita Flederman, and Ania Grabarek all suffered (though to vastly different extents) for the actions of their men. Their husbands are arrested and executed, leaving the women to fend for themselves. Each of the women has a different response to their trials, echoing the responses of their fellow Germans to the actions and legacy of the Nazis.
Marianne von Lingelfels is a dynamo. She managed to hang on to her family castle (the titular one) in spite of her husband’s plotting. At the end of the war, she wrangles a “victim of the Nazis” status from the Americans and sets about finding the wives and children of the July 20 plotters. Marianne is more an comfortable with her role as conscience of the German people—most of her neighbors loathe her for it because she refuses to let anyone forget what happened and who was to blame for it. At first glance, Marianne might look like a hero, but there’s a reason why there’s a saying about the impossibility of living with saints. She holds everyone else to a very high standard and falling short is inevitable for the women she rescues.
Benita Flederman was a very young girl when she married a man who would become a July 20 plotter. She was so young when she married just before the war that she was a recently graduated member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, a youth group that indoctrinated girls and women in National Socialism. She was virtually clueless about her husband’s actions until they landed her in prison and sent their young son to a children’s home for re-education. At the war’s end, Benita is again victimized by Red Army soldiers as they revenged themselves on the German population. Her story is the most tragic, showing us how some Germans were never able to move on with their lives because the past was too shaming, too awful.
Ania Grabarek was the most interesting character to me. She is the pragmatic one of the trio. Rather than forging ahead to do whatever she thinks is right (like Marianne would) or drifting through her memories (like Benita), Ania keeps her head down and gets on with things, doing sometimes ugly things to keep herself and her two sons alive in desperate circumstances. Ania’s path is one of compromise and secrecy—and contains a big twist that I did not see coming.
I suspect that contemporary readers would hope they’d react like Marianne in the face of the Nazis’ war crimes. She stands up for what is right no matter what the costs, but her firm moral stance is made easier by her high social position and connections. But what we’d do is probably a lot closer to what Ania and Benita did, I think. In the face of so much violence, hunger, and loss, it would be easier to capitulate or only take care of one’s own. The Women in the Castle, however, resists clearcut judgments of the three women. They and their circumstances are realistically complicated. The complications and the women’s reactions to events would make rich food for a book group’s debate about idealism and pragmatism in the face of systemic evil of National Socialism.
This sounds like a very interesting book. As a pastor (and just someone who enjoys theology and philosophy) I have to think quite a bit about issues of idealism vs. pragmatism. I think that there are objective moral principles that set “guardrails” within which we can exercise a degree of pragmatism, and there is (or at least should be) empathy, grace, mercy, and forgiveness for when we go outside the “guardrails.”