Tellingly, Irmina’s sorrow is without the sightless trace of remorse. The author points up the flaws in Irmina’s nature.Īlthough independently-minded and capable of confronting racism head on while in London, in Germany she gradually and opportunistically accepted the nazi modus vivendi in pursuit of the status and recognition that went with it and the gravity of such compromise is implied in Howard’s honest incomprehension, not to say naivete. With her husband Gregor killed in the war and son and grandchildren in a distant city, the visit is an opportunity to summon up old memories and speculate on what might have been. The narrative fast-forwards to 1983 when, while working as a school secretary, Irmina receives an invitation out of the blue to visit Howard, now British high commissioner for Barbados.
Yelin promotes the view that they bought heavily into the project in more ways than one but particularly its opportunity for social advancement. Were they victims, as some would have them portrayed, or willing participants? The narrative is a vehicle for a much wider debate around what ordinary Germans, women in particular, did during the nazi period. Ominously, he disappears for days on end during the Kristallnacht attacks on the Jews. She meets and marries an architect, a rabid anti-semite and a fanatical SS member associated with Albert Speer.
Nazism in Germany is in full flight and Irmina is working for the Ministry of War and her career’s on the up. She decides to go back to Germany but not before solemnly promising Howard to be back as soon as possible.īut it’s not to be. They cycle, walk and go boating together until Irmina’s allowance is exhausted. While in London she falls for Howard, a Bajan who’s among the first black students at Oxford University. BARBARA YELIN was impelled to create this fiction after reading letters and diaries by her late grandmother, who lived through the nazi period in Germany.ĭespite her upper-class provenance, the financial resources of its protagonist Irmina von Behdinger are relatively modest but, ambitiously, she travels to London to study to be an executive secretary.
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