On Getting the History Right (or Trying to…)

The foundation for All Things That Deserve To Perish, the story of a gifted German-Jewess who finds herself in a fragile mixed marriage, was laid in my early days as a graduate student in history. On reading a biography of Bismarck’s banker, Gerson Bleichroeder, I landed one day on a story that really moved me.

Bleichroeder’s young daughter, Elsa, was consigned a wallflower at her first court ball, not because she was unattractive, but because she was Jewish. The Prussian aristocracy cut her – this as an anti-Jewish political demonstration! For some reason at the time (my romantic disposition?), I seized on this little morsel of Jewish history, thinking. “What a scene that would make in a novel or movie!”

It took almost forty years before I incorporated that historical episode into a novel, but it was just one troubling incident of many that I read about in my years of graduate study in modern German history. Taken together, they all convinced me that well before Hitler came to power, German elites subjected Jews to vicious anti-semitism.

And that taking some of the more provocative of these anti-Jewish experiences and weaving them into a well crafted fictional work would provide the general reader some insight into one of the knottiest questions of twentieth century: Was the Holocaust an accident of modern history, or was it primed to happen in Germany?

All Things That Deserve To Perish is a work of fiction, an historical novel whose style consciously evokes elements of late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. Its literary influences include the works of Theodore Fontane, Elizabeth von Arnim and Thomas Mann. But even more important to the novel’s structure, character development, and plot are the historical sources that inspired it – principally letters and memoirs from the period.

These sources were where I started my research. And they were the primary feed for my narrative imagination, providing me with a rich trove of psychological and situational material to draw on.

People have asked me how it is that All Things That Deserve To Perish turned out to be a largely epistolary novel, a novel of letters. The answer is simple. The first rule of historical research is to go after “primary source” material – eyewitness accounts of the period under study. Letters are probably the best source material, because they tend to be honest reflections on the events and the environment of their writers’ lives.

Trained as an historian, I wanted to create as realistic a glimpse into my heroine’s late nineteenth century German milieu as possible. So the first order of the day was to create some “primary source” materials for her and my other fictional characters. I started writing letters on their behalf – that is, faking the kind of material that would allow me a level of comfort with telling a story from their perspectives. Once having written those “letters,” I found they brought the plot seamlessly forward and even had a genuineness of expression that was not wholly due to my conscious efforts.

Naturally, my fictional primary source materials were based on extensive readings not only of bonifide letters and memoirs written by Germans and German Jews, but also on biographies and assorted historical monographs. For example, Shelley Baranowski’s regional history, The Sanctity of Rural Life was a fount of information on early twentieth century country life in Prussia. It really helped me to set the scene for my heroine’s married life. Similarly, Barbara Hahn’s The Jewess Pallas Athena was a great help in understanding the phenomenon of the cultivated Berlin “salon Jewesses” – those brilliant and alluring women at the center of Berlin social life who brought intellectuals, aristocrats and artists into their living rooms for chamber music and an exchange of ideas.

One of the great challenges of penning an historical novel is getting the details right – the clothes, the means of heating and lighting, the architecture, the transportation, the cost of goods, the manner of spoken expression, etc. I am convinced that including these particulars is crucial to setting up trust in the reader, and providing him or her an immersion into the historical epoch. Many individual scenes in my novel involved extensive research into these often obscure elements of everyday life .

And here is where the internet really helped me to do some sleuthing. I was able to spend days online studying photos of manor estates in Western Pomerania, along with turn of the century villas in Berlin. And I spent weeks searching through the particulars of women’s clothing, train schedules, post office hours, even the phases of the moon over the period of the two years in which my novel takes place. And this, all without leaving my desk chair!

It may interest the reader to know that real historical figures make appearances in my novel, and that their portrayal in so-called cameo roles has its own special challenges. It was great fun to re-imagine famous people entering the world of my fictional characters. But there was always the constriction of being forced to stick closely to the arc of their lives and to what is known about their personalities.

Being an older woman, I believe I had a distinct advantage in writing about fin-de siécle Germany.. Born in the mid-twentieth century, I had exposure in my childhood to many European emigrés, including my grandfather, who spoke the German of the early twentieth century. I hope that my early memories kept me on the rails of a fairly authentic depiction of the values and manners of an historical epoch almost a century and a quarter in the past.

– Dana Mack, author

Dana is the author of two non-fiction books: The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family (Simon & Schuster; Encounter Paperbacks) and The Book of Marriage: The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions (Eerdmans). An historian, journalist and musician, Ms. Mack’s articles on music, history, culture, family issues, and education have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Commentary Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New Criterion, the Washington Post, USA Today, and many other publications. All Things That Deserve To Perish is her first novel.

All Things That Deserve To Perish

The year is 1896, and Elisabeth (‘Lisi’) von Schwabacher, the gifted daughter of a Jewish banker, returns home to Berlin from three years of piano study in Vienna. Though her thoughts are far from matrimony, she is pursued by two noblemen impressed as much by her stunning wealth as by her prodigious intellect and musical talent.

Awakened to sudden improvements in the opportunities open to women, Lisi balks at her mother’s expectation that she will contract a brilliant marriage and settle down to a life as a wife and mother. In a bid to emancipate herself once and for all from that unwelcome fate, she resolves to have an affair with one of her aristocratic suitors — an escapade that, given her rigid social milieu, has tragic consequences.

All Things That Deserve to Perish is a novel that penetrates the constrained condition of women in Wilhelmine Germany, as well as the particular social challenges faced by German Jews, who suffered invidious discrimination long before Hitler’s seizure of power. It is also a compassionate rumination on the distractions of sexual love, and the unbearable strains of a life devoted to art.

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