Worms under rocks

As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs.

Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle

In Germany after the war, finding ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers was as easy as turning over a rock. Even Marianne von Lingenfels finds this to be true in Jessica Shattuck's powerful 2017 novel The Women in the Castle.

The widow of a man  executed for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, she tries after the war to gather up as many wives and children of resisters as she can find and take them to her family castle. She finds just two of the women on her list, beautiful Benita, the widow of Marianne's childhood friend who was also executed by the Nazis, and Ania, a somber woman whose name on the list is something of a mystery. Both women have young sons.

Years pass, and life in postwar Germany gradually gets easier. Yet Marianne discovers disturbing things about the two women she has adopted as part of her family. Benita falls in love with a former Nazi and wants to marry him, while Ania already has a Nazi husband who turns up after she marries a nearby farmer.

Marianne feels betrayed, but by 1991 when the novel ends she wonders if she is not the one who has betrayed her friends. Are there not worms even under her own rock?

Shattuck's book explores the lives of the war's widows and the ways Nazi guilt spread to them and even to their children, proving that Nazi Germany, the subject of so many novels since the 1930s, can still be mined for original plots and ideas.