by Julie Mayhew
Das Buch Isidor a collection of anti-Semitic sketches by Mjölnir and Goebbels, 1928
Das Deutsche Mädel The German Lassie (monthly magazine for Hitler Youth girls)
das ist lecker that is delicious
Das Dritte Reich the Third Reich
deutsch/deutsche/deutscher/deutsches/deutschen German
deutsches Mädchen German girl
Deutschland: Damals und Heute Germany: Then and Today
dieser gute deutsche Mann this good German man
drei three
eins one
Eine Flamme Ward Gegeben (song) A Flame Was Given
Endsieg final victory
Entschuldigung sorry
Er ist ein guter Mann he is a good man
erzähl mir von deinem Vater tell me about your father
erzähl mir von dem Ort an dem du vorher gewohnt hast tell me about the place where you used to live, before
erzähl mir was von deinem letzten Wohnort tell me about the last place you lived
Es Klopft Mein Herz Bum-Bum German war-era song. Translates as: It knocks my heart, boom-boom
Es tut mir leid I’m sorry
Es war bestimmt nicht so schön wie hier, oder? I bet it wasn’t as nice as here, was it?
Familie, Kinder, Haus family, children, home
Frau/Fräulein Mrs/Miss
Frau Aufseherin Madame Overseer/Matron
Frauen Warte Women’s Observer (Nazi women’s magazine)
Frauenschaft Women’s Association
Fritten fries/chips
Führer leader
für dich, für uns beide for you, for us both
Grüβ dich hi (literally: Greeting you!)
Götterdämmerung the title of an 1876 opera by Richard Wagner, meaning, the twilight of the gods (a disastrous end).
guten Tag hello (literally: good day)
Hakenkreuze hooked crosses (swastikas)
Hausfrau housewife
Herr Mr
Herzchen literally: little heart, darling
Ich hab dich lieb/ Ich liebe dich I love you (the first is a fond, platonic expression, literally: I have love for you. The second is stronger).
Ich, Jessika Davina Keller, dulde keine Terrorakte gegen das großdeutsche Reich! I, Jessika Davina Keller, cannot condone acts of terrorism against the Greater German Nation!
Ich kann mich kaum erinnern I can’t really remember it
Ich liebe euch I love you (plural – to more than one person)
ja, gut yes, fine
Jungmädel Hitler Youth group for girls aged 10–14
Jungmädelschaft Fellowship of young girls
Jungvolk Hitler Youth group for boys aged 10–14
Kaffee und Kuchen coffee and cake
Kameradschaft Fellowship of boys
kaputt broken
Kein Schöner Land in Dieser Zeit (Song) No More Beautiful Land in this Time
Leben Ohne Liebe Kannst du Nicht (Song) You Can’t Live Without Love
Leberwurst liverwurst, a sausage made from pigs’ or calves’ livers
Mädchen girl
Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen Girls of Today, Mothers of Tomorrow
Mädelschaft Fellowship of girls
mein kleiner süβer Singvogel my sweet little songbird
Mischmasch mishmash, hotpotch or concoction
Mutti mummy
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nazis)
nein, überhaupt nicht so schön wie hier no, nowhere near as nice as here
Nestbeschmutzer nest defiler, a whistleblower or a traitor
O Tannenbaum (Song) O, Christmas Tree
Oma grandma
Papi daddy
Reich nation/empire
sag es say it
salutier, Schlampe salute, slut/bitch
Schätzchen baby/darling/poppet
Schutzpolizei security police (uniformed police)
Schutzstaffel the SS Nazi protection force
Schweinehund pig dog
Schwester sister
Seelöwe sealion
sing, Schlampe sing, slut/bitch
sing fröhlich, du Hure! sing gladly, whore!
Singvogel songbird
Sonderhäftling/Sonderhäftlinge special inmate/ special inmates
Sonnenwendfeier summer solstice celebrations
Sonnenwendfeuer summer solstice fire
Staatsfeind/Staatsfeinde enemy/enemies of the state
Sturmbannführer Major
Tanz Rüber, Tanz Nüber (Song) Dance Hither, Dance Thither
Uropa great grandpa
Untermenschen subhumans
Unterscharführer Junior Squad Leader
Vater father
verdammt! dammit!
Verräter traitor
viel Glück! good luck!
was sagste, Fritz, sollen wir eins für den Führer machen? whaddya say, Fritz, shall we have one for the Führer?
Wehrmacht armed forces of the Third Reich
Willkommen welcome
Winterhilfswerk Literally: Winter Help Work (an annual aid programme)
Wir brauchen ihn. Wir brauchen das. We need him. We need this.
wir gehören dir we belong to you
wohin? where to?
wohin gehst du? where are you going?
zeig mir dein Herz! show me your heart!
zeig mir deine Liebe! show me your love!
Zimtschnecken cinnamon buns (literally: cinnamon snails)
zwei two
Zwei-Kinder-System Two Child System
Zwischenraum Literally: between-space
Historical Notes on The Big Lie
‘This is science fiction but it is science fiction in terms of what is here now.’
~ William Burroughs talking about The Nova Trilogy
Okay, so The Big Lie isn’t strictly speaking ‘science fiction’ but it does take place in an unreal world of my creation. I prefer the term ‘alt-history’ or Margaret Atwood’s description for this kind of book – ‘speculative fiction’. The Big Lie is me taking a guess on what might have happened.
I returned to my copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – which I first gobbled up as a teenager – when I was asked to write this piece for the back of the book. In the back of Margaret Atwood’s book you’ll find ‘Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale’ where she imagines a Cambridge Professor speaking in the year 2195, giving his opinion on the long-dead oppressive regime described in her story.
This fictional professor explains how none of the cruelty in Gilead was new or original, it had all gone on before somewhere on Earth. He then backs this up with real examples from the reader’s world.
This is when you come to see the power of science fiction (or speculative fiction or alt-history or whatever you want to call it) – at its heart, it’s not really fiction. It’s a patchwork of the terrible things humans do to other humans, all the time, every day, in our very real world.
So it was with The Big Lie. There was very little that I had to make up. My fiction just grew from the facts.
The Bund Deutscher Mädel was a genuine organisation in Nazi Germany that instilled a fanatical love for the Führer and the Fatherland among its teenage female recruits. Women were encouraged to be strong and pure as the nation’s future baby-makers, and for a period young couples took marriage examinations to ensure they were healthy enough to make a good match.
Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen was a real book that taught young girls about being a woman, Das Deutsche Mädel was a genuine companion magazine for members of the BDM (the girl who we’ve spray-painted on the cover was featured in the October 1936 issue) and those posters on the walls of the meeting hall were produced weekly by the Nazi Party’s Central Propaganda Office. When Jessika describes exercises in her school biology textbook, she is describing the real pages of Leitfaden Der Biologie 1, which instructed students on what would happen to society if ‘quality’ people didn
’t do their duty and have more than two children, and all the songs Jessika sings in The Big Lie can be found in Nazi music books. When Jessika’s mother tries to give her daughter a warning over the washing up she alludes to The Poisonous Mushroom, a children’s storybook designed to instil a fear of Jewish people. Jess and Lilli’s puppet show, Trust No Fox on the Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath, is from another such storybook.
But it wasn’t just the Nazis who were writing. Their detractors, predominantly communists, produced Tarnschriften (camouflaged publications) that on the outside looked like innocent pamphlets on housekeeping and shampoo but inside criticised Hitler’s regime. Here came the inspiration for Clementine’s smuggled-in magazines.
Jessika’s experiences at Highpoint are based on accounts that I heard and read from women who were held at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The babies at Elmdene developed from stories of Aryan children stolen from their Eastern European parents to be brought up in ‘good’ Nazi families. Disabled children, like George Hart, were euthanized under Nazi Racial Hygiene rules, while women (and men) suffered forced sterilizations for health reasons, both physical and mental.
Even the small details came from a place of truth. Clara’s letter about silver aeroplanes was a paraphrasing of a beautiful piece of writing by a political prisoner in Ravensbrück to her husband, words that I just could not shake from my head. Also etched into my mind was a piece of graffiti etched onto the wall of a death camp – They’ll shoot you anyway.
So perhaps all I did was create a terrible jigsaw puzzle rather than write a book. But if that is what I did, it is certainly not a jigsaw puzzle of the past.
The main leaping-off point for this book was my seven-year-old son asking at the dinner table: ‘What would have happened if the Nazis had won World War II?’ I only decided to add to the stable of books that have tried to answer this question (mainly written for adults, I might add, mainly written by men) after Justin Bieber visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and wrote in the visitor’s book Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.
Social media was awash with fury about this remark. But I liked what he’d written. Maybe Anne would have been a belieber. Why must we put her in a fusty box labelled ‘the past’? Read Anne Frank’s diary and you’ll find a fun, rebellious girl who liked music and boys and talking smart.
It is a seduction to think of the past as another place where they do things differently (to paraphrase LP Hartley). It lets us off the hook too easily. If the Nazis rose up now, we tell ourselves, we would never have been hypnotised. We are nothing like those people from history. Which leads me neatly back to that William Burrough’s quote …
The Big Lie is a science fiction written in terms of what is happening right now.
Across the world, young gay people are still sent to priests, psychiatrists and needle-wielding doctors to ‘correct’ their homosexuality. At least seventy-eight countries have laws against same-sex relationships, and in five of these countries you can face the death penalty if convicted.
In Kiev in 2012, a topless Femen protestor took a chainsaw to a giant wooden crucifix because she was so furious at the sentencing of the Pussy Riot protestors, who dared to express their opinion about their leaders and the church. On release from prison, Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova spoke of the gynaecological examinations they had suffered while incarcerated and how they had to sift faeces from the drains before they could take a shower.
In 2010, a young man called Mohamed Bouazizi, who worked as a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, had his goods confiscated by the authorities. No longer willing to tolerate continual harassment from the police, and desperate for the return of his produce and equipment, Bouazizi set himself on fire outside the governor’s office – and triggered a revolution.
If this still feels too far away from our Western liberal lives, consider how the front pages of our newspapers choose a different group of immigrants each week to blame for unemployment, crime and problems within the health service. Consider how only a few years ago the British National Party managed to hold two seats in the European Parliament and get a voice on BBC Question Time, a party which, in an echo of Jess’s schoolbook, says on its website: Given current demographic trends, we, the indigenous British people, will become an ethnic minority in our own country well within sixty years – and most likely sooner.
In this country we are separated by the schools we go to – though money is the great divider here, not the shape of your forehead – and the children who attend the small percentage of private schools will go on to occupy a disproportionately large number of the positions of power. And while our society may not demand that women stay fit and pure for childbirth, if a high-profile woman should leave the house without make-up or if she gains some weight, that woman is then shamed in the national press. (The illegal magazine that Jessika pores over in the book? Real, and one that you have probably read recently.)
We like to think of ourselves, historically, as the great liberators of the Jewish concentration camps. Yet, in May 1943, while World War II was in its final years, a Jewish Polish socialist called Szmul Zygielbojm killed himself in London. By my death, his final letter read, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people. On the day I sat down to write this, I listened to accounts on the radio of Jewish people in London, who live in fear of violent anti-Semitic attacks every day.
Perhaps what finally convinced me to write this book was a conversation I had with my five-year-old after a gymnastics class.
‘If you fall to the bottom of the foam pit,’ he told me, ‘you end up in China.’
Just like Jessika in the book, I laughed. And just like Lilli, he was cross that I didn’t believe him.
It made me realise how readily we accept the things adults tell us, no matter how big the lie. We might be told these things directly, for fun (Father Christmas, anyone?), but we also receive a drip-feed of snobbery, sexism and racism from society as we grow up. Slowly, slowly catchee monkey. Often these lies stay with us and they feel like truths. I must behave this way because I am a woman. I must not trust this group of people because they are bad. We are a democracy and our leaders do everything in our best interests.
So when Jessika says at the start of the book that people like us challenge everything just because we can – is she right? Or do we think in the way she describes at the end of the book – It’s all so easy, I don’t really have to think at all?
I’m not suggesting you set light to yourself in the market square. Absolutely not. Please don’t. You are much more effective while you are alive. I’m saying revolution starts by asking, Is this right? And if it isn’t, trying to do something about it.
Want to know more?
For further information about life under Nazism, I can recommend the following. A few of these are hard to get hold of from bookshops and libraries – try second-hand book websites or make a visit to the Wiener Library in London (www.wienerlibrary.co.uk).
HHhH by Laurent Binet (Vintage, 2013)
Seemingly a novel about a real-life plot to assassinate the chief of the SS, but really it’s a story about an author’s struggle to tell the truth. Do all accounts of history contain lies?
Nazism and German Society 1933–1945, edited by David F Crew (Routledge, 1995)
Includes several revealing essays on women’s lives in Nazi Germany, and explores how some people resisted the Nazis and others complied.
God Remained Outside: An Echo of Ravensbrück by Genevieve de Gaulle Anthonioz (Souvenir Press, 2000)
A personal account from the niece of Charles de Gaulle who was sent to Ravensbrück.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Penguin, 2007)
Whether she would have been a belieber or not, Anne was a wonderful writer, bringing to life the joys as well as the terrors of being young and Jewish during W
orld War II.
Stasiland by Anna Funder (Granta, 2011)
This is actually about the former East Germany rather than Nazism, but Anna Funder’s book is useful if you want to understand more about how states try to control their people.
What Difference Does a Husband Make?: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Post-war Germany by Elizabeth D Heineman (University of California Press, 1999)
Particularly good for researching the Nazis’ attitudes to marriage – and their management of it.
Hansi: The Girl who Loved the Swastika by Maria Anne Hirschmann (Kingsway, 1973)
An unusual autobiography from a former BDM member. When Hansi discards her Nazi thinking, she replaces it with the evangelical belief that God speaks to her.
Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France by Agnes Humbert (Bloomsbury, 2008)
A stunning memoir by art historian Agnes Humbert who was put in prison for her part in the French Resistance and forced to work in appalling conditions in factories in Eastern Europe.
Hitler’s Children by Guido Knopp (Sutton Publishing, 2002)
Exposes how seductive the Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Mädel were to young people in Nazi Germany.
Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Killing Fields by Wendy Lower (Chatto & Windus, 2013)
An abundance of evidence demonstrating that women were not always innocent bystanders in Hitler’s regime.
Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self by Melita Maschmann (Plunkett Lane Press, 2013)
Melita, who was in the BDM, writes this book as a letter to her former Jewish school friend trying to explain why she betrayed her during the war.
Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–45 by Jack G Morrison (Markus Weiner, 2000)
A comprehensive resource for understanding the day-to-day horrors, and mundanities, of life in the women’s camp.
The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality by RJ Overy (Penguin, 2010)
This book gives some insight into the never-realised Operation Seelöwe (the Nazis’ plan to invade Britain) and is useful for understanding the cracks in the Allies’ campaign that were fortunately not exploited.
Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich by Claudia Schoppmann (Columbia University Press, 1996)