The Good at Heart

by Ursula Werner

  One of the reasons the novel is dominated by female characters is because the Eberhardt family is based upon my mother’s family. The Posse family is predominantly female: my maternal great-grandparents had two girls and a boy; my maternal grandmother had three girls; my mother had two girls; my sister and I each have three girls. There are very few boys or men in that family tree, and those who marry in usually divorce, back out, or die off relatively young. There was a moment during one of my family visits to my mother’s house when my husband was getting a bad cold and my mother brought him some Echinacea oil, claiming it would minimize his symptoms. He took one look at the dark brown fluid in the tiny vial and pushed it away, shaking his head and saying, “This is how the men in this family disappear, isn’t it?”

  So I don’t think I consciously set out to present a female perspective on the war, but in retrospect, there may have been some unconscious instincts toward that end. While I have read enough memoirs by male (and more recently, female) soldiers to know that the reality of fighting in any kind of war is horrendous, I think that there are unique hardships in being left behind on the home front while your loved ones are off at war. I wanted to give voice to some of those difficulties—maintaining a façade of hope and cheer for your children, even as fear and anxiety over the safety of your loved one gnaws at you day and night; offering your loved one unequivocal support by phone or telegram or mail, even as you yourself might desperately need comfort or reassurance; struggling to keep a household running during a time of rationing or shortages so that life seems as normal as possible.

  I think the women of The Good at Heart make some of their choices not so much because they are women but because they are mothers. It is the nurturing instinct to take care of another human being, to put his or her well-being ahead of their own, that informs many of their actions. I don’t believe that kind of instinct is necessarily limited to women. But I do believe that if ninety percent or more of the earth’s leaders had the instincts of mothers, we would live in a vastly different world.

  What would you name as the major theme(s) of the novel?

  I have no doubt there are many more themes in the novel than the ones I might identify, but one of the major themes in my mind is the strength of family. All the adult Eberhardts—Edith, Marina, and Oskar—cherish their family and prioritize its cohesion and safety. Edith focuses on maintaining domestic stability during wartime. Marina struggles mightily with the passion she feels for Erich, which pulls her away from Franz, her parents, and her children. And Oskar offers his life as the ultimate sacrifice to keep everyone else in the family safe. The importance of family ties during war is, of course, nothing new. But I do think that keeping that theme in mind gives us some insight into the conflict many Germans faced when they considered what actions, if any, they might take to oppose Hitler and his policies.

  Which brings me to another concept that I hoped to express in the novel: the shortsightedness of a black-and-white approach to history. When you really look at historical situations closely, trying to consider all the circumstances surrounding difficult questions, I think it’s almost impossible to view them in sharp contrast. From the distant perspective of the future, looking backward, historical questions always appear more black and white than they actually were at the time. I don’t mean to deny that terrible incidents of hatred and violence—by both actors and onlookers, Nazis and ordinary Germans—took place in Nazi Germany. Undoubtedly and tragically, they did. But I think we should be careful before we assume that all Germans were complicit in and sympathetic to such incidents.

  My novel suggests that history’s truth, if it can ever be determined, is more gray. That’s one of the reasons I love visiting my mother’s home in southern Germany in the winter: gray is the predominant color over the Bodensee in November and December, and there are countless shades of it. The gray reminds me to keep my judgment in check; to temper my preconceptions about other people; to slow down, look, and listen to everyone and everything, because in fact we all know so little.

  Anne Frank’s quote provides a lens through which the reader can come to understand the characters and their motivation to do good. Was the Diary of Anne Frank an inspiration for you in writing this novel? Can you tell us other novels or memoirs that inspired you as you wrote?

  I had read the Diary of Anne Frank long before I wrote the novel, but what I am struck by, each time I read it, is what I suppose I would call its relative “ordinariness.” Here is a young girl, forced during wartime into hiding in a relatively cramped space with seven other people, under constant threat of discovery and either execution or deportation to a work camp—and she still fills her diary with humor, complaints about the foibles of others, and run-of-the-mill adolescent angst and self-analysis. That human ability to create normalcy, even in the context of an ongoing fearful and uncertain situation, shaped how I wanted to present my story. Because in the midst of the war—Captain Rodman’s haphazard firing of machine guns through the streets, an underground effort to smuggle refugees into Switzerland, and a plot to assassinate the Führer—the people of Blumental are living their lives as normally as possible. They are going to market, they are inviting each other for coffee, they are gossiping, they are going to choir practice. I consider that instinct to establish normalcy part of our survival instinct, and it is an amazing demonstration of the adaptability of the human spirit.

  There were many books and memoirs that informed and inspired The Good at Heart. I read numerous biographies of Hitler, which so cluttered the bookshelves next to my front door that I began to fear what people would think of my politics when they entered my home. More inspiring were the biographies and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (upon whom Johann is very roughly modeled), whom I consider one of the most admirable men in history. And I was fascinated to learn about the activities of the German resistance, especially as recounted by Joachim Fest in Plotting Hitler’s Death and Peter Hoffmann in Stauffenberg: A Family History. Also, Barbara Demick’s book Nothing to Envy, about life in North Korea, was an invaluable resource for understanding the reality of life in a police state.

  Are you working on a second novel? Can you share any plans with us for future projects?

  The project I am currently working on is a mixture of memoir and history, a story of growing up in South Florida in the 1970s—a tale fraught with backyard alligators and flying cockroaches and sudden thunderstorms spawning waterspouts around a small family sailboat. One future project I am particularly excited about, but for which I have yet to do an enormous amount of research, is a historical biography of a well-known biblical figure.

  Enhance Your Book Club

  1. For the characters in The Good at Heart, choices between right and wrong are never clear-cut. In many ways, all the characters had to make tough decisions about what was right in the moment—sometimes with terrible consequences. “Our choices are not always what they seem to others,” in chapter 15. Oskar tells Marina. With your book club, discuss this quote in light of Oskar’s job. To what “choices” do you think he is referring? Does this quote act as an omen for the ultimate choice he has to make to disappear from his family—or do you think that disappearing was not his choice? Consider all the tough choices the characters in the novel have to make, and share a time when you were faced with a dilemma in which you had to make a choice that could have seemed wrong from another point of view. How did you manage to make the decision? Did you gain any hindsight after the choice was made? If you had the chance to do it all over again, would you?

  2. Edith’s statue of Daphne in her garden becomes a kind of sanctuary for the women in the house, a place to sit and contemplate difficult decisions or the unlikely roads that led the family to have the Führer in their living room. With your book club, read the myth of Daphne: www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Minor_Gods/Daphne/daphne.html.

  3. Afterward, discuss the myth as a group. Why do you think Edith—and later Marina—feel drawn to the statue? Can you note any
connection between Daphne’s story and the story of these women?

  4. Despite the turmoil aroused by the Führer coming to the Eberhardts’ home, much care and attention is given to preparing the best desserts to accompany coffee and tea. Host an afternoon tea for your book club, and prepare some of the same treats Edith and Mariana made, including a Linzer torte (www.joyofbaking.com/LinzerTorte.html) and a strudel (www.quick-german-recipes.com/german-apple-strudel-recipe.html). Over tea and coffee and the desserts, discuss what it must have been like to have Hitler sit at your table. How do you think Edith, Oskar, Marina, and the others managed? Share a time when you felt distressed about a guest arriving in your home.

  5. The work Johann and Marina do to offer safe harbor to Jews during the war is difficult in part because of Oskar’s prominent position in the Führer’s cabinet. Difficult—even impossible—decisions are often the focus of Holocaust narratives. Host a movie get-together with your book club and watch Sophie’s Choice (1982). Discuss how Sophie’s Choice parallels the choices the characters in the novel have to make. What do you think you would do if faced with such impossible decisions?

  – About the Author –

  © GEOFFREY KLINEBERG

  Ursula Werner is a writer and attorney currently living in Washington, DC, with her family. Throughout her legal career, Werner has pursued creative writing, publishing two books of poetry, In the Silence of the Woodruff (2006) and Rapunzel Revisited (2010). This is her first novel.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Ursula Werner

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  First Touchstone hardcover edition February 2017

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  Interior design by Jill Putorti

  Jacket design by Ian Koviak

  Jacket photographs: woman © Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel, train station and passport page © Shutterstock

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Werner, Ursula, 1964– author.

  Title: The good at heart / Ursula Werner.

  Description: First Touchstone hardcover edition. | New York : Touchstone, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016023467 (print) | LCCN 2016028853 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501147579 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501147586 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781501147593 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Fiction. | Families—Germany—Fiction. | GSAFD: Domestic fiction | Historical fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3623.E767 G66 2017 (print) | LCC PS3623.E767 (ebook)| DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023467

  ISBN 978-1-5011-4757-9

  ISBN 978-1-5011-4759-3 (ebook)