Review: Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman – Friedrich Christian Delius

Peirene Press has made quite a splash with its first three elegantly produced novels.  All three are translations from European languages, all are short (approximately 125 pages) and they all share a precision of writing which might make other novels seem verbose and over-long.

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, the third in the series, is published this week. It is simple in concept, being an account of a young woman’s walk to church from her home in a guest room of an old-people’s home in Rome (which is run by Protestant nuns).  The year is 1943, and the young woman is German, her husband a young ordinand who despite an earlier injury to his leg, has been sent to support the German army in their campaign in Tunisia.

The woman is heavily pregnant with only a month to go before the baby is due, and as she walks through the city we read of her thoughts on love, war and the German cause, while she also notices the beautiful surroundings as she passes the landmarks of Rome – which Delius describes in such detail that it is tempting to get on a plane and fly out to see them for yourself.

The novel consists of a single sentence extended over its 117 pages.  But this does not make the book difficult to read because the text is broken up into paragraphs, and the technique preserves the flow of the woman’s thoughts over the hour of her walk.

Delius captures the naivety of a young woman brought up under the Nazi regime.  She finds it hard to accept that Germany is no longer sweeping to victory.  Stalingrad has passed, as has Alamein, and the thought is beginning to dawn on her that ultimate victory is no longer assured -

. . . since she was twelve years old the Fuhrer of the German Reich had proceeded from one triumph to the next, for as long as she could remember he had only won, conquered, been celebrated, cheered, even during church services thanks were offered up for the political and military successes too, and her husband would only be able to return soon if they were victorious, but is more defeats threatened on almost all fronts, he would stay there, his life in ever-increasing danger, and she would have to wait longer and longer.

Delius has captured the woman’s confusion in trying to integrate two competing philosophies in her mind.  On the one hand she is typically patriotic,with even the thought of German defeat seeming like a vile heresy that cannot be uttered. The young woman has a strong Christian faith, but this seems to be mixed up with powerful nationalistic feelings, no doubt instilled in her while she was in the League of German Maidens.  Her room-mate Ilse disturbs her by uttering mild critique of authority figures, not only the Fuhrer but also German aristocrats and leaders.  But our young woman, far from seeing the reasonableness of Ilse’s comments sees them as un-Christian -

. . . even if all that were true and Ilse were not exaggerating, you have to be wary . . . it was still no reason to run down Germans from the educated classes or German aristocrats, who no doubt had a deeper insight into things than Ilse, it was not Christian either to feel superior to others or to pass disparaging comments . . .

Friedrich Christian Delius

At first glance, the novel feels like a simple read, but it has many subtleties which tackle the dilemma of how “good” Germans could support such a disastrous regime.  Delius also grants us access to the dilemmas which faced Christians who tried to live out their faith under the regime.

The woman finds that The Bible has become problematic to her:  even the Patriarchs seem somehow suspicious, particularly Jacob who summoned the people of Israel to disperse all over the world, “. . . and that was precisely the problem with the Jews, who were responsible for the unhealthy mixing of the races, as she had learnt at school . . ” .  She had been brought up Christian, and remembers her father saying, “our God . . . is greater than all reason, and also greater than all the figures of authority . . . if the Fuhrer places himself above God and God’s will, then we must not obey him blindly”.  Delius captures the confusion in her mind as she tries to reconcile love for a nation heading headlong to a disaster of its own making with love for the Christian faith which her parents instilled in her.

Friedrich Christian Delius knows much about these dilemmas for he was brought up with the two sons of Georg and Annaliese Groscurth who stood against the Nazi regime and sheltered Jews from persecution.  His earlier work, My Year as a Murderer, incorporates elements of the Groscurth’s lives and deals with the release from prison of a Nazi judge.

I have read many books which explore the views of “ordinary people” when swept up in the fervour of wartime.  What comes across in this book is the way in which the woman’s settled thoughts are gradually challenged by the relentless stream of events.  She has lived under a false system but we find her rejecting the promptings of truth which come at her from three sources: her memories of her father’s words, the questioning of her room-mate Ilse and the German defeats on the Eastern Front and in North Africa.

This is a snapshot of a single day but Delius shows terrible storm-clouds gathering  over the beauty of Rome with the approaching thunder almost drowning out the magnificent music in the church.  From this description of a single day, we can tell what the end will be, and it will not be good.

Author page at the Goethe Institute
Author’s website
Author’s Wikipedia page (in German)