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Under Charred Skies
by Greta Sykes
(Authorhouse, £15.95)
CLEVERLY using the framing device of diary notes of conversations with her mother, narrator Lene in Greta Sykes’s novel retells the latter’s life story growing up in Weimar Germany through the years of Hitler’s rise to power.
The mother is keen for her young daughter, a budding writer, to tell her story before she dies and takes it with her to the grave.
The author brings an unusual perspective to this period of history, being German-born but having lived many years in Britain where she has been active in left-wing politics.
The socialist-realist style employed is a brave attempt to interweave the lives of ordinary working people and the historical processes in which they were embroiled. History as refracted through the lives of those caught up in it can be a more vibrant way of capturing it than many an academic treatise. But it is a difficult task.
As a young girl during the Weimar years in the 1920s, protagonist Lene becomes part of the broad socialist and communist anti-fascist movement but finds herself married unwittingly to a man who becomes a nazi supporter.
The author is keen to bring that period alive for a new generation and to portray the hardship, turmoil and tragedy as the logical result of global capitalist forces. After the devastation left by the first world war, the republic offered the German people some hope.
But the hardships imposed by the Versailles Treaty, the occupation of the industrial Ruhr by the French, rampant inflation and then the world economic crisis gave the social democratic government little chance and, with support from Western capitalist interests, the door opened to Hitler.
That contextualisation is laudable and necessary but the characters are not sufficiently fleshed out to hold continued interest. Dialogue is used as the main means of driving the narrative forward but it is burdened with having to explain complex historical events and processes and becomes all too easily transformed into a didactic tract.
A more subtle use of dialogue, allowing deeper truths that lie beneath the surface of everyday life to be revealed by implication rather than spelling them out, would have made the novel stronger.
Yet for anyone wishing to know what life was really like for ordinary Germans living in the industrial Ruhr during the inter-war years and beyond, Sykes’s novel provides as good a starting place as any.
Review by John Green
