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Erika Quinn, "This Horrible Uncertainty: A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New books network.
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B
In December 1943, a young German woman named Vera Conrad received the news that every wife on the front home front dreaded. Her husband Joachim was missing on the Eastern front. He was not dead. He was not alive. He was simply gone. For the next five years, Vera lived in the horrible uncertainty of not knowing. She raised her children, managed a farm, oversaw laborers, all while pouring her terror, hope and loyalty into a diary that started as a baby book and and ended as a chronicle of collapse. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am Deepa Charya, and today I'm joined by Dr. Erika Quinn to discuss her book, this Horrible A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948, published by Bergan Books in 2024 through the Diaries and personal papers of a German woman, Vera Conrad. Her book documents Vera's wartime experiences and deepens our understanding of the complex experiences of trauma and grief that National Socialist supporters against. Building on scholarship about mourning and widowhood that largely focuses on state policies and public discourses, this horrible uncertainty provides an interpretive framework of people's perceptions of events and their capacity to respond to them. Using a history of emotions approach, Dr. Quinn establishes that keeping the diary allowed Conrad to develop different selves in response to her responsibilities, fear and grief. After her husband was declared missing in 1940, 3. Lastly, it is a story that challenges us to look at the ordinary German woman not just as a victim, a perpetrator, or even a bystander, but as a complex subject trying to survive a world she helped create. Dr. Quinn, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:52]
C
Thank you, Deep. So happy to be here.
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B
All right, to start with, I really wanted to talk about your trajectory as a historian. Your first book was on Franz Liszt, a giant of 19th century high cultures. And now you're writing about, like a 20th century farm wife, Germany. So how do you get from Litz to Vera Conrad? Is there a through line in your interest in subjectivity? What can you say about this very interesting journey from historicizing great men to studying all taga Sheikhte, or everyday people, both of which construct a sense of self.
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C
Great question. I've been wondering when that was going to come my way, because it is such kind of an odd juxtaposition that I've created. And I think that you're noticing about subjectivity in relationship to larger structures. Right. In this case, maybe more ideological than, you know, economic structures or political structures. But I'm really interested in interiority and how do we locate that and how does it change? And it's interesting that you chose Great man for the label for list. I understand that. And I think part of what I was interested in was trying to see him as ordinary, like an ordinary Central European, that his choices were privileged but also not uncommon for that part of the world.
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B
Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting in a way. And I. And I wanted to say, like, talk more about this because of his stature in 19th century and how well he is known compared to, let's say, say, a person like Vera Conrad, who's just lost in the archives if you did not choose to represent her story to us. So I think that was what I was getting at, the trajectory from that to Vera Conrad. But thank you so much. I wanted to talk more about the archive. So your book is based on a specific diary from the Walter Kempowski archive. Can you tell us the story of how you found it? And I'm particularly interested in the fact that it was originally a baby book. So how does that physical starting change how we read the war entries that follow? Like, I want to push on. Its materiality, like transitioning from recording babies first steps to bombing raids, is quite startling.
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C
I was, as your introduction pointed out, when I started looking at war widowhood and bereavement and grief, I noticed that it was very difficult to find firsthand accounts. And I scoured Many archives in Berlin where I was doing research and found a lot of correspondence. But it was all one sided and went to the Kampovsky and spent many days reading all of the diaries from the war and sobbing, reading beautiful, beautiful accounts, seeing gorgeous illustrated mementos of, you know, courtship and early romances and him going to war. And when I, when I found this particular diary, it was a photocopied excerpt. So I didn't get to work with the original until I went to the owner's house. But that, that oddness of baby book and war chronicle, I mean they, I think for her it wasn't odd because it was going to be a, a chronicle of growth and goodness the way a baby book would be in her early understanding of the war, I think. So it's all like, oh, look at all these wonderful things that are happening. Which is of course in retrospect, really disturbing. But yeah, it was a very optimistic source on both accounts, both about her son and about the war effort.
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B
As someone who's also very interested in working with ego documents like I really look at war diaries of Wehrmacht men or SS men and I approach it through the heuristic of fatherhood, how they are writing back home and I try to analyze the silence, like how they are trying to reconcile mass murder with that domestic idea of being a father and a husband. So I think trying to be a historian myself, I really resonated with how you used the source and it's really a learning curve for me and how to treat a source in general and in particular. So I now want to talk about trauma and defining trauma. You use a specific psychological framework to understand Vera's grief, ambiguous loss and developed by Pauline Boss for our listeners who might not be like into psychoanalysis or even psychology. Can you define that theory of trauma for us? Why is missing so much harder for the human mind to process than dead? And did you conceive that missing? How did you conceive that missing in this story of the horrible uncertainty?
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C
So if I, if I take a step back and talk just a little bit about more straightforward trauma, Trauma by definition is a disruption. It's a break, it's a gap, it's a hole in the narrative. And when we then shift to ambiguous loss, like those missing in action, the, the facts aren't there. And so there's an, there's an infinite realm of possibility, of narratives. And from what I've also started to learn about brain science and grief, we, we record our relationships at a very deep implicit level. And when those Relationships go away. It takes our brains a long time to rewire and not and, and really understand and incorporate that loss. And so grief in a, in a healthy, so called healthy process and is attacking between looking for the future, planning to the future and mourning and grieving the loss and looking back. And I think that that oscillation gets very disrupted when there isn't a certainty about the legitimacy of the mourning or the legitimacy of planning the future. And so these ambiguous losses leave people in this traumatized limbo in ways that they have to. I think that to transcend, transcend, to transform, to move through a loss like that requires a bigger leap of faith that I'm going to make up a narrative that I know might not be factually accurate, but it's the one that means the most to me and that I can live with. So I think there's a lot more agency and creativity in making up the meaning from a loss like that, which I think my book argues Vera Conrad was not successful in doing.
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B
But yeah, oh, that's great. And a question tied to that. So the interdisciplinarity of your book really shines in the reconciliation of psychology and history. Was it difficult in a way, or were there any learning points as you tried to bring the two disciplines together and trying to historicize, or how did that conception happen?
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C
I had been increasingly drawn to and embedded in history of emotion, scholarship. And doing all of this work led me to actually stop being a professional historian and become a clinical therapist. And in that process I was able to incorporate some of what I was learning in grad school. And I guess for me as a historian, the big question, and the question that honestly still remains about this work is so we have, you know, current brain science that's 80 years ahead of the way people thought about. She never used the word trauma. So again, this ahistorical, potentially anachronistic because we know that science changes over time. And so I was mindful that there are some, I guess I would consider them maybe purist historians who are, are very suspicious of using that kind of approach and anthropologists and people who have critiqued all of that. And at the same time it felt to me like a framework that could explain some of what's happening because the way the diary is written is so. It's so clearly a fragmented narrative in a lot of ways. And I feel like I, I was really trying to, to wear the science fairly lightly.
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B
Yeah, that's again, this is something that I also am very interested in. I'm very interested in psychoanalysis. And one of the books that I read was Plough Stabilites Male Fantasies. And I really wanted to do that kind of work. But I like, I know about the kind of resistance that you're talking about from purists or anthropologists where the kind of work that I want to do might be called anachronistic in general. And I have often been pushed or shoved towards doing more archive based work instead of trying to bring in psychology or any other discipline for that purpose. But I really want to do this kind of work and I think that your work stands out in a way and it helped me a lot to think through this better. So from your introduction and you talk about the different types of diaries and you classify them very beautifully, I want to talk about this idea of keeping a diary. How Vera Conrad's diary was not just a passive record for herself, but it was almost an active participant in her survival. And you call it a feedback loop. So according to you, how did this act of writing to her husband, even when he wasn't there, help her maneuver this loss? I'm interested in how the book, the diary becomes almost a prosthetic person.
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C
Oh, prosthetic person, great phrase. I'm thinking about one entry in particular that I spend quite a bit of time on in the book. When she has an encounter with a man she knows it's a somewhat unfriendly, conflictual encounter and she writes in the diary about it and the way she frames it. She's telling the story to her husband through the, through the book and she is positioning herself in a very specific way. And she's also confident that he's going to accept how she's framing herself. She doesn't qualify it or ask questions about whether he agrees. And so she's presenting an iteration of herself that then she can refer back to. And so that's, that's what I mean when I talk about creating selves. That there are, there are points of view, perspectives, emotional tones that become patterns in the work and that as they are patterns, they become more and more reified for her because she can refer back to how I felt then is the way I feel now, the way I will feel in the future. So it's creating continuity for her through this really ruptured experience.
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B
Okay, now let's talk about the Nazis. So we tend to think of emotions as natural. We are sad, so we cry. But the history of emotions tells us that feelings are also learned too. So to that end, in your reading of National Socialism and its historiography and primary sources. What were the emotional strictures of National Socialism? And how as a German woman, was Vera supposed to feel about the war? And from your reading of Vera's diary, did she struggle to perform those emotions? Is there any tension or is there any attempt made by her to repudiate or reclaim or accept those emotions? And in that light, could we also possibly talk about the stigma of defeatism at play here? Because you talk a great deal about defeatism from World War I.
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C
You know, Victor Klemperer's work was so helpful for me in being able to really pinpoint this very strange pairing paradox of what I'm going to call and he calls and the Nazis called fanaticism with stoicism. The we're going to be fanatics when we see the fur, when we see the flag, we're going to scream and cheer our guts out. And when challenges happen, we are supposed to be action oriented and stoic to the point I'm almost thinking now that stoicism isn't quite the word. I don't know that we have a word in English for this. But action overrides everything else to the extent, I mean, where people become mechanized. If we look back to World War I as you started, to invite me to the idea that soldiers, you know, simply become behavioral action entities that don't have any interiority or experiences. I, I mean, I think many people have pointed out that interiority is, is what is to be wiped out in avid fervent Nazis, that there, there ought to be no inner psychological life at all. And so of course gender also tempers all of that. And Vera Conrad had a very difficult time reconciling the idea of a victorious war with a husband who's missing. And Lutheran stoicism, which also is a contributor and kind of salt of the earth, hard working, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps ethos with this profound and bewildering grief that left her so vulnerable and over. Of course there's no room for any vulnerability in a Nazi emotional imaginary. So it was, I would say it was an impossible task to try to toe those lines for her own emotional needs and the social political performance.
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D
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E
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D
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B
You also mentioned how Vera wasn't just a grieving wife. She was a Nazi party member. She was a district farmer. She managed laborers who were forced. How does the diary account for these laborers? Does she see them at all? Does she mention them? Does she have any form of empathy for them? Or does her own suffering blot out theirs? The representation of her own suffering in that regard? How many different agencies can we map out here in her story? I understand that this bears the crucial ethical element that you address in your book. And I'm curious, how does her victimization coexist with her role as this bystander or someone who was a supporter in a way, or a part of the National Socialist state?
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C
She was part of the state for sure. It's a really complicated question and I wrote many drafts, especially around these sticky issues. This was one of the most difficult things for me to really feel like I had gotten it right or acceptable. She does talk about forced laborers, and she talks about them in the way that from what I understand in my reading, most landowners did. And that that is they are simply kind of entitlements. And migrant laborers had been part of farm life for a long time. And so there really isn't any work that Vera does to imagine her way into any of those laborers experiences. She considers them hers, almost like pieces of property. And yes, she. She is a participant. She's the supporter of the regime. She is a privileged woman who owns land and wields Authority over younger women laborers, the other farmers, who she is managing to some extent. And she's also a woman who is being threatened, directly or indirectly, by male neighbors as well. So it is a really layered story about agency. She, of course, didn't see much of her own agency. She portrays herself as a victim a lot of the time.
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B
And this is where I'm really curious. How does she write about her relationship with her children in the diary? And how does parenting come up? Because we know the father is absent, and she's trying to mediate this ambivalent relationship with a person that no longer exists. And how does that trickle down to her parenting her children?
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C
I want to say what she says about her children kind of allows me to read between the lines. It's never explicitly named. But the fact that her children are trying to come up with narratives about where Daddy is and they're trying to explain it, and that she doesn't challenge those narratives that Daddy is in Russia and he's coming home, clearly it was a shared concern in the family. Even though her children were very young, she, you know, it's maybe fortunate that in farm life there isn't that work life, separation. So the kids were with her a lot. They were out in the yard, they were in the meadows, they were in the fields. So there wasn't the kind of disruption of two parents leaving the way there might have been in the city. And she's very protective, understandably. They're going through bombing raids. They're watching neighbors lose their lives and their livestock. And you can also see the influence perhaps of Nazi ideology on the way she talks about her children and praises how blonde they are and those kinds of stereotypical racial attributes.
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B
This question might be redundant now that you've talked about the rural setting, but you mentioned this. And I agree that most of our stories about the German home are urban, like in Hamburg or Berlin, and in general, urban spaces. But in this story, Vera is a rural person. So I'm wondering, how does. And you do address this in great detail, how does the countryside setting change the narrative, do you believe, specifically, how did the lack of distinction between home and work, public and private, impact really her experience?
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C
It definitely complicates the sometimes overly neat binary between masculine and feminine spheres. And it. I think it also speaks to a different kind of community. This is a village of 75 people. It's so tiny. And while this family was there only for a generation prior, it wasn't a deeply rooted family. In. In this landscape, there's a. A visibility And a knownness. I think that cities are much more anonymous and I think there's also a shared unspoken set of values. There's less diversity. I mean, I. I'm speaking ideologically now, but obviously there's less diversity of other kinds as well. So that homogeneity, I think also complicates the story in, in that I'm. I'm really kind of thinking through this because I haven't fully thought this through, but I'm. I'm just kind of throwing it up against stories of bombings in the cities, for example, or, or of women's lives in the city. And that, that sense that Vera knew all of her neighbors gives her. It feels like her stake in the regime and in the war is definitely more personal and maybe feels higher to her because everyone she knows, everyone who dies within, you know, a 25 mile radius. And I have to think that knowing individuals as opposed to strangers makes a difference on your sense of community and the impact of the war. And to see her neighbors arrested. I'd like to think about that more. Thanks for that question.
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B
Yeah, it's very interesting how you bring in this idea of the public and the private and the urbanity and rurality, because this is something that I've not really read in scholarship in the German language or in the English language. You mentioned that 4.4 million German women were waiting for missing men. A statistic that like Frank Wiess mentions too in his Homecomings book, which is also particularly famous. And that is a staggering number. Like do you. And now let's talk post war. Do you think this collective state of suspended grief shaped the post war German female psyche in any way? Did it contribute to the silence about the holocaust in the 1950s?
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C
Wow, that's a really interesting question. As much as I would like to say yes, I don't think it did contribute to the silence about the Holocaust. I think there were so many. Any political pressures because even if, even if women did know that wouldn't have widened their compassion for other victims from what I've seen. Alas. You know, the other thing about Waiting Wives is it's, it's such a different story. Whether you're talking about the Federal Republic or the German Democratic Republic, if you're talking about east or west, because benefit structures were completely different. And in the west those women were co opted by the regime as war victims. And they became so emblematic in ways of the rebuilding. And they're completely silent, they're silenced. There's no traces of them really in the German Democratic Republic in East Germany. They're just absorbed into the workforce. I'm thinking about the silence at home. You know, I'm thinking about films like the Nasty Girl. And I imagine I. I don't have evidence to really support this because I haven't seen a lot of ego documents from Waiting Women particularly. But because. Because everybody's gotta make the narrative. The kids are gonna either learn Daddy's not coming home from Russia or we don't talk about Daddy. But there's going to be something and there's going to be a silence probably no matter what.
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B
That's very interesting. Yeah, I do think that. And in my own research I also look at post war retrospective interviews. Like there is Cloud Landsman's Shoah film which talks about wear marked men in post war interviews. But they're talking about their service and this idea of the virtuous wear marked and silence, total silence about the Holocaust. And not trying to come to terms with it, but like trying to frame it as service towards the cause. You mentioned fanaticism. I think it's a really interesting point. One of my last questions is how sudden Vera's topping writing was in 1948. Like why do you think it. And I know that you have been introduced to her children, so why then can you think how or what changed in her life or in Germany that signaled the end of this horrible uncertainty?
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C
If we look at very large political structures, 48, 49 is when the division between east and west is really becoming formal and ossified and it's clear that that division is going to last. So at the high political level there's certainly the end of the immediate post war era and real orientation on both sides of the future, wall to future and rebuilding for her. There are these long gaps in the diary and with those missing years one has to simply kind of interpret lightly, I imagine. Well, she was already exhausted. I imagine that formally becoming a client state of the Soviet Union was extremely painful for her. And thinking it feels like closing a door. It feels like closing a door. And on. On hope her son would have been almost 10. And her interest in Lutheranism and church participation and church leadership I imagine gave her a good enough narrative along with the future orientation of having to rebuild her farm to make the diary either unnecessary or too costly to continue. And I'm not sure which one or both that would have been. Like, like I said, this is kind of my interpretation and speculation based on very little evidence. So we know that family conversations about this didn't happen in at her House.
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B
Was her children aware at all during that time that their mom maintained this diary? Or did they come like, were. Did they become aware after long time that she stopped writing this? Like, did you have, do you have any knowledge of that from your conversations?
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C
My sense is they knew from a pretty young age about the diary's existence. She always had it with her. I don't think they had a sense of the chronology. And I would be very surprised if either of them remembered her actually writing in it. I think they would have been too young to know about that and I think she wouldn't have done that when the kids were in the room. So I don't know when they came to know of its existence. And it's, I'm going to say, radioactive energy in the family, not to be touched.
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B
Okay, to end with, you've in 2021, you've worked on animals, machines and AI, on human and non human emotions in modern German cultural history. And then you write. So do you see a connection between, like Vera's reliance on her diary as an object and your other questions that you think of from time to time about how we relate to non human entities?
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C
Humans imbue meaning everywhere we go on everything we encounter. And robots, diaries, I mean, I haven't used this word, but you could consider the diary a tool. And there's, you know, it's a tool that benefits her, but it's also a tool that brings her profound pain. And thinking about animals as tools or animals as others, or robots as others, there is this fraught relationship that humans bring to non human entities. Right. Because we are fraught and were meaning makers and we're projectors.
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B
Oh, that's wonderful. I really liked We're Projectors to end with. In conclusion, what is your one key takeaway from writing this book?
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C
As a historian, I didn't set out to write a history of World War II at all. I'm not trained as a World War II historian. I thought I was looking for a diary from the First World War, which was already outside my 19th century focus earlier. And it's teaching a methods course. For example, I would always tell students about how our history tells us so much about our contemporary moment. And I don't know how many of them really appreciated that, but this is my first experience writing something that has such contemporary resonance. And it's been, it's been dismaying, it's been really rewarding and enriching for people to engage with this book on at least two levels. And so that's the kind of engagement I really love about history. And were I to continue writing in history, which I hope to do, I would really hope to write in a way to allow that double engagement in my future works.
- [33:49]
B
Okay, so the book is this horrible uncertainty. A German Woman Writes War. It is a profound look at the labor of waiting and the history of human emotions in times of crisis. Thank you so much for joining us on the New Books Network. Dr. Quinn, thank you. You've been listening to the New Books Network. I'm Deepa Charya, and we'll see you next time.
- [34:22]
C
For children.