Author Chris Bohjalian puts spotlight on WWII Germans

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - His latest novel is not his first inspired by real life, but Chris Bohjalian knows it's a huge departure from his 10 other books.

"It's the first novel that isn't largely set in northern New England or nearby. That was more liberating than you can imagine," Bohjalian says. "I wrote scenes set in March and didn't have to describe a sugar house! That was great. I was telling someone how much fun it was and how different it felt to write historical literature, and he said, 'Oh, come on. Evergreens, snow, unpleasant temperatures _ how far did you really go?'"

Author of "The Double Bind," "Before You Know" "Kindness" and "The Law of Similars," among other novels, Bohjalian traveled pretty far. "Skeletons at the Feast" (Three Rivers, $14.95 in paper), follows the harrowing exodus of east Germans who flee the advancing Soviet army in the waning days of World War II, a setting that Bohjalian calls "the most brutal period in human history." The novel, inspired by the diary of a friend's East Prussian grandmother, brings together an unlikely contingent: German teenager Anna Emmerich and her younger brother Theo; their mother, who at the start of the journey still believes in her Fuhrer; Scottish POW Callum, who had been working at the family's farm, and Uri, a soldier whose mysterious identity deepens the thrust of the novel and casts a shadow on the romance between Anna and Callum.

On a journey of a different sort is Cecile, a concentration-camp prisoner bent on survival as guards ruthlessly march the inmates west.

Bohjalian, who lives in Vermont, was interested in themes similar to those found in "The Reader," a novel and movie he greatly admires.

"From the very beginning, I wanted to explore the complicity of the average German citizen in the Holocaust. How do the Nazis murder 6 million people without there being a certain amount of complicity?"

Question: Were you skeptical when your friend first asked you to look at the diary?

Answer: My first reaction was: "Start the waterboard torture now." But I'm good friends with him, so I said I'd be happy to look at it. As I do with most of these sorts of things, I went in with low expectations. The reality is the diarist was a woman living in a real cauldron, and while a lot of the diary was the minutiae of living in a rural corner of Europe between wars and had more about growing sugar beets than anyone needed to know, it was riveting not just from historical perspective but from the characters. ... There were pages that stayed with me. Eight years later, when I read Max Hastings' "Armageddon," about the last year of the war in Germany, I started having moments of deja vu.

Q: Is the Emmerich family typical of the German family of the time?

A: I wanted to convey an extremely ordinary, rural German family. They're certainly entitled, wealthy, but they don't have a lot of amenities and luxuries that some of their peers might've had. They're not capitalizing on the Nazi regime for the sorts of splendor other aristocrats might have been doing. Anna's entire character arc is the sense she's largely oblivious. ... That casual anti-Semitism was virulent in the cities from 1933 on, and an entire nation looked away as a percentage of its citizens had civil rights winnowed away. And then the deportations and exterminations began. If you're the Emmerich family, you might be oblivious to the deportations because you don't see it.

I interviewed a couple of elderly Germans for this book who said, "I didn't know anybody who was Jewish." You want to say _ and I did _ "But still you had to be aware of Kristallnacht!" They had no answers.

Q: What are some of the challenges of writing a historical novel?

A: First of all, there's the challenge of historical detail. When you're writing about the Second World War, the Civil War, the First World War, there are people who know this material inside out, and if you have the wrong shade of green for an Army uniform, they will point it out to you. If you have a Spitfire flying farther than it can based on its engines and gas tanks, they will let you know. I had to be scrupulously accurate. ... I had to understand conversation in a way that I didn't in other books. I know how people speak in 2009, but how an 18-year-old Prussian farm girl might speak in 1945 is different. You want to convey authenticity. When I was interviewing people for the book, I would listen carefully to how they spoke.

The third challenge was geography. There were maps of Poland in 1939 prior to the invasion, then there were maps of Poland under German occupation where many towns were renamed, and then maps of Poland in 1946, when the Soviets renamed the towns yet again. So I was constantly layering maps upon maps, making sure my characters weren't walking 80 kilometers in a day.

I write in the library in my house that used to be a living room, and my desk takes up a small portion of the room so there's a lot of floor space. Usually it's used by my cats to play turd hockey, but my wife walked in one day and saw about four square yards of maps on the floor.

Light Your Free Candle for Pope Francis. May He Rest in Peace.

Q: You seem comfortable writing from a variety of perspectives. Is that something you strive for?

A: Sometimes I fear I am more of a mimic than a novelist. I do like exploring different voices and perspectives in a narrative. I had great fun writing about Dana Stevens, the transsexual in "Trans-sister Radio," and being a midwife's daughter in "Midwives." "Skeletons" is a pretty traditional Jamesian novel, in the third-person omniscient, but I really enjoyed viewing the world from Anna's perspective and from Theo's, too. And despite whatever mimicry I resort to, all these books have a tiny bit of autobiographical minutiae in them. Most novelists pull small details from their lives shamelessly. In the case of "Skeletons" all of the scenes involving Anna and Theo and the horses were pulled directly from when my daughter was a little girl, and we rode horses together two or three days a week. Those scenes are reminiscent of those afternoons.

___

© 2009, The Miami Herald.