Fables and Lies

It was another day of perfect Führer weather.

Clearly, this is Hitler's Berlin. Swastika banners are everywhere but cafés are full of chatter and laughter, Berliners stroll in the golden twilight, couples waltz on open-air dance floors, and theaters and opera are flourishing. However, all is not as rosy as it seems. Hitler salutes are the expected greeting, spies are everywhere, and denunciations for not conforming to the rules of the regime are common. Twenty-one-year-old Freyja arrives back at her family's apartment block to be told by her unpleasant, ever-watchful neighbor, that the Gestapo have just "roughed up" 17-year-old Dieter Weber for listening to swing music and have smashed all his records.

She finds Dieter's grandfather cradling the badly injured boy in his arms, but he warns her not to stop and help because the Part Block Warden is watching.

In Freyja's own family, too, there are tensions.

Her father, Conrad Bremer, had fought in the First Word War and has burn scars on his face and one arm amputated at the elbow. He helps out at a church-run Jewish emigration service and was recently arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo for this, but in spite of promises to his family when he was released, he continues to be involved with the Christian underground network.

Her mother, Elza, praises Hitler for improving German life after the war and the Depression. She mortifies Freyja by publicly boasting of family bloodlines that meet SS standards for marriage. And she approves of her eldest daughter, Volla, who is the mistress of Otto von und zu Erlbach, an aristocratic SS officer, and is proud to "do [her] duty" and bear his Aryan sons. Otto, whose wife has earned a Silver Mother's Cross for bearing six children, is generous and buys Volla expensive clothes. He also allows her to keep their son, Siggi, with her family, although illegitimate Aryan children are supposed to be brought up in Lebensborn Foundation Homes.

Freyja is not interested in marriage, and she enjoys her work as a secretary at the Pre and Early History Museum. She is determined not to follow Volla's example and become "a potential SS brood mare," in spite of her mother's hectoring: "To Eliza Brenner, emancipated working women were loose and selfish, and probably communist, too."

So, Freyja is dismayed when Volla tells her she has arranged a family supper to which Otto will bring an unmarried friend, who is also an SS officer.

"Is he in the Reich Security Service like Otto?" she said, alarmed.

"No, He's an archaeologist with the SS Deutsche Ahnenerbe." Volla gave a half-smile. "Believe me. You'll be impressed when you meet him."

Freyja is intrigued. The Ahnenerbe is an academic institution. But the man is still an SS officer. She doesn't share Volla's admiration for the Führer's elite corps.

In spite of her misgivings, she is impressed by Kasper Voigt, enjoys hearing about his work, and finds him attractive, so she agrees to meet him again. He takes her to dinner at the luxurious Adlon Hotel and is attentive, but she is aware he is subtly checking her marriage credentials, and she challenges him on this, which he accepts with good humor.

Then, at work, Freyja meets Dr Darien Lessing, who appears to be an old and valued pupil of the museum's Direktor, Wilhelm Unverzagt. She is shocked by the impolite familiarity he adopts with the Direktor, but their mutual respect for each other's work is apparent. Lessing has just returned from five years of PhD study in England and is hoping to join an archaeological dig Unverzagt had been planning, but is dismayed to hear it has been abandoned. However, the Direktor has received orders that, because of the imminence of war, the museum's treasures must be catalogued and moved to safety. He offers Lessing the job of organizing this, and to her amazement and delight, appoints Freyja as his assistant.

Working with Lessing, Freyja finds his rudeness and disrespect for Nazi ideals fascinating and dangerous. But his love of the museum's treasures, especially the Great Treasure of Priam, known as "The Jewels of Helen of Troy," is clear, and her chance to handle them is thrilling. He, however, starts to tell her things that make her question all she ever learned at school about German history and prehistory, as well as many of the underlying beliefs she has accepted and adopted. This includes the World Ice Theory, which the Führer promotes, and which he believes underpins the superiority of the Aryan race. She has discussed this with Voigt, who is engaged in research to prove the primordial Aryan ancestors founded a great city in inner Asia after the sinking of Atlantis.

The attraction between Lessing and Freyja grows, and they secretly become lovers, so she decides to stop meeting Voigt. But he uses his SS power and his knowledge of her father's undercover activities to force her to marry him.

So, the essential elements of Elisabeth Storrs' novel are set up. But this is not a simple love story. Over the next few years, as war is declared and British, then also American, bombs fall night and day on Berlin, Storrs captures the terror of the people as they cower in air-raid shelters, listening to the explosions and feeling the ground shaking as nearby buildings are destroyed. Freyja continues to work with death and destruction all around her. She learns more of the fables and lies she has been fed, and she experiences Voigt's brutality as a husband, and his ruthlessness in arranging Lessing's arrest and death sentence. She also learns Direktor Unverzagt, having experienced discrimination in the past that thwarted his career prospects, has decided to adapt, but not abandon, his principles in order to find special favor with influential Nazis. When she asks him to help save Lessing's life, he tells her he cannot do this, but nonetheless somehow, Lessing is released—but into service in the army.

She is shocked when Otto decides Volla must take their two sons to a Lebensborn Foundation Home, and Volla takes menial work there so as to be close to them, but Freya also discovers her sister is involved in "retraining" (i.e. Germanizing) kidnapped Polish children who look suitably Aryan.

Freyja learns, too, that Lessing's sister, Parisa, is married to a Jewish doctor, and they both work at the single hospital allowed for Jewish people. As the arrest and transportation of Jews out of Berlin increases, the hospital is eventually seized and closed, with the patients and staff, including Parisa's husband, still inside. This drives Freyja into dangerous resistance—joining Parisa in a protest outside the hospital and aiding her husband. At the same time, she discovers Voigt's role in one of the SS's darkest research programs.

The horrors in this book are not easy to read or to read about. But the insight it offers into the lives of ordinary people who have grown up in, and are controlled by, a dictatorship in which they are taught and trained to believe fables and lies raises questions about such control in our own lives and those of others around the world. Freyja is a likable character, and Elisabeth Storrs lets the reader feel her love, disillusionment, fear, and determination; but she would not have been the only one at that time to suffer, to question, and to have to make decisions balancing principles and danger.

In her Author's Note, Storrs outlines her approach to the historical facts included in the book, and her research has been thorough. Her access to Direktor Unverzagt's wartime day-journals, his correspondence, and an article written by his wife, helped her to chronicle his efforts to preserve the museum's treasures. And the Jewels of Helen, discovered by Schliemann and his wife in the way she describes in the book, were indeed taken by the Russians to Moscow and "hidden in the Pushkin Museum for more than 50 years."

Fables and lies are still being told, and as Storrs writes,

It is chilling to watch similar preconditions to those arising after WWI occurring across the Western world... social media algorithms isolate people in a continuous loop of skewed views as effectively as Goebbels' Volksemfanger radios. As a result, families and communities are polarised, just as the Bremer family were.