By Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin, 1999

I am fascinated by spy stories, and find stories of double agents the most engaging of all.  I am sure I give myself away in trying to pass off even a small white lie, so reading about someone whose whole persona is an elaborate tissue of lies takes me away from myself.  I also am practically addicted to Holocaust and concentration camp memoirs, and my book shelf contains a number of both kinds.  These kinds of books are  removed from my own life while they make statements about the universality of pain and inhumanity.

I picked up The Nazi Officer’s Wife at the Whyte Avenue Value Village, and thought I would give it a quick skim through.  In fact, I read every word.

Edith has a happy childhood in Vienna in a basically secular family.  Her happiness ends when the Nazis come to power in 1938. Edith escapes removal to the east by adopting the identity of an Austrian women who swears she lost all her papers in the Danube while boating. With these papers Edith does her best to disappear into provincial life in Germany. Her disguise  involves being as quiet, pleasant, and apparently dull-witted as possible.

When a German man becomes her lover, Edith is trapped in what is essentially an abusive relationship, but it is the best she can do under the circumstances. She throws herself into being the perfect German housewife as a means to survival.  Her lover Werner—eventually her husband and the father of her child—is an angry, powerful man who is protective of those he loves. Early in the relationship she tells him about her Jewishness and he does not betray her.  He could be killed for consorting with a Jew, he could also be killed or at least severely punished for the elaborate highly convincing lies he tells to get off work in his job painting Luftwaffe bombers.  And eventually they listen to the BBC together with the radio under the pillow. Blind in one eye because of a motorbike accident, Werner is drafted and quickly becomes an officer when German is losing, and is soon a prisoner in the Soviet Union.

The complexity of Edith’s relationship with this man kept me reading.  She is frank about enjoying sex with him, saying it was the closest thing to freedom she knew during those years. While he is still a POW, she draws on her previous legal training to become a family court judge in the GDR and remembers this job as the most satisfying time of her life.  She is able to pull enough strings to expedite her husband`s return but the marriage quickly falls apart, as he cannot accept having his previously subservient wife working outside the home in a position of power. When the Party puts pressure on her to pull strings back, that is, to inform on her neighbours and co-workers, she escapes to West Berlin with her daughter.

From the daughter`s prologue I get the sense that the rest of Edith’s life was nowhere near as vivid or as oddly satisfying as the years of her first marriage and her work as a judge. As Ian Buruma says in his history of the year 1945, many people had a difficult time making the transition from trauma to everyday life.