More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Sturmabteilung. The storm division, the storm troopers. That was the more formal name for the brownshirts who were such a ubiquitous presence on the streets. There were also the SS, or the blackshirts, who acted more as bodyguards to Hitler and his top officials. But the SA were the ones who Althea saw the most.
Why would they be cracking down on cabaret clubs? Deviants, Althea’s mind supplied as she scanned the crowd around her. Men wearing makeup and women, with short, slicked hair, wearing suits. Women holding hands with other women, men doing the same with other men.
“You would think we are two biased sides of the same coin.”
The way to judge people wasn’t to look at how they acted toward people they wanted to impress; it was to look at the way they treated those who could do nothing for them.
“Don’t let the propaganda fool you, dove. The fervor for Hitler is not quite as ferocious as the Nazis would have you believe. There are plenty of people who hold their noses and work with him regardless.”
“Life isn’t a fairy tale,”
“Good people do bad things, bad people do good things.
“Did you know it was not only novels burned that night in Berlin?” the librarian said, as they started toward the back shelves. “Not many people realize that only a few days before the burnings, the students raided the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.” At Viv’s confused silence, the librarian looked back over her shoulder and then translated. “The Institute of Sexual Studies.”
“They destroyed the place, which was conducting groundbreaking research on women, homosexuals, and sexual intermediaries,”
founder Magnus Hirschfeld from the lobby of the institute and days later carried it as a war trophy to the burnings in Opernplatz,”
Hirschfeld.
Women, homosexuals, and sexual intermediaries.
“Burning books about things you do not like or understand does not mean those things no longer exist.”
“Sometimes it’s the ones they didn’t burn that bother me more,” the librarian mused, shelving a volume of Freud’s research.
“Nazis are portrayed in propaganda as ignorant anti-intellectuals. But the leaders know just how powerful knowledge is. That’s why they want to control it so strictly.”
“They had hundreds of thousands of members reading Goethe and Schiller, and any pro-German literature they wanted to send out.” The librarian shook her head. “I suppose it’s like your ASEs.”
“Everyone has a political agenda.
“Favorite book,” the librarian repeated, as she situated herself on the stool. “I think that’s like picking a favorite moment in your life. Perhaps you could name one but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a hundred others nearly as worthy.”
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book.’”
But if we burn the world down to destroy the Nazis . . .” Hannah finished his thought. “There will be no world left to live in when they’re gone.”
“We will never convince the Nazis of anything,” Otto said, sounding far more lucid now. “It’s not our job to convince them. We have to convince the world.”
“Is anarchy so bad, then?” Otto asked. “When the other option is Hitler?”
“Must be nice to be able to choose ignorance,”
It mattered that the Nazis saw the whole world wasn’t standing with them.
“Do you know of Althea James?”
Had this been a book she was writing, Althea would have charged into the square, stood in front of the woman, and faced down her abuser, no matter the consequences. In real life, Althea stood in shadows and watched.
She wanted to lean into him. It would be so much easier just to believe what he was saying rather than face her own shame.
Althea had been unable to denounce the Nazis because she had been worried that if she admitted they were monsters that meant she was one, too. No one wrote themselves as the bad person in their own story.
No character was ever completely good or evil, but rather they were made up of a number of traits. Those traits plus the choices they made defined what role they played in the story.
A hero could be stubborn and use that to defend his homeland. A villain could be stubborn and because of that refuse to see that his views were immoral. Only few traits were inherently bad. Cowardice had to be one of them.
Althea wasn’t simple no matter what anyone in Berlin might think. She just preferred the safety of books to reality.
the fictional stories allowed her to wear blinders, allowed her to grow close to people, made-up though they might be, without the vulnerability that came with actually being known.
she had been in bed with monsters. She had been used by them, put on display as an example of the accomplishments of the master race.
“I didn’t know,”
“You didn’t want to know,”
“No one wants to be the villain of the book,”
“A villain. Is that what you are?”
“What else would you call a person who willfully buries their head in the sand when evil is taking place all around them?”
“A German.”
you are no worse than every country in the world, no different than every leader who sees Hitler as a fringe lunatic who lucked into power,”
You’re making this all about you. It’s not about you. It’s about a dictator who wants to kill every non-Aryan in the world. And please believe me, if he somehow accomplishes that horrific feat, he will move on to killing Aryans with brown eyes, and then ones with too-long fingers or crooked teeth.” She paused, exhaled. “This is not about you.”
“If you spoke up, if you disobeyed a boycott, if you slapped that handler of yours across the face, do you know what would happen?”
“Hitler would still be rounding up communists to put into his little jails. He would still be launching his war against the Jews, he would still be murdering his political opponents by the handful. This is not about you.”
“You don’t think one person can make a difference?” “I think one person can,” Hannah said, without blinking. “I don’t think that person is you.”
Althea had no power here to stop this madness. Wouldn’t it be better if she just fled the country?
“You want to do something?”
“Stay, then,”
“See the real Berlin for the next three months. Our Berlin. And then when you go back home, make sure the people there know exactly what’s happening in Germany. Not just the headline version, but what’s really happening. You can correct assumptions you hear, you can tell one person and they can tell one person and so on. Push back on bigotry even if you want to smooth it over. Eventually it will add up to something more than nothing, even if it isn’t the grand gesture your current emotions want you to make.”
“Maybe you’ll be the hero of the story yet.”
there were several velvet-covered barbs about her ability despite the fact that she was a woman.
