Daughter of the Reich - Louise Fein

Louise Fein’s  novel Daughter of the Reich is loosely based upon her father’s family history. Fein’s father was one of the lucky Jews who managed to escape Hitler’s clutches before that became impossible. He and his young wife were taken in by England in 1933 on a temporary visa, and he remained there on a “temporary” basis until finally being granted citizenship in 1946.

The novel’s narrator is Hetty Heinrich, the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi officer with grandiose ambitions. The story begins in 1929 when seven-year-old Hetty accidentally falls into a lake’s deep water and has to be rescued by Walter, a friend of her older brother Karl. Of course, the entire Heinrich family is grateful to Walter, including Hetty’s father – even though Walter is a Jew. Now, flash forward to August 1933, and things are very different. Hitler is becoming more and more powerful, but it is happening so gradually that the inevitableness of what is to come is not immediately apparent.

Even Karl and Hetty, four years after Hetty’s rescue by a Jewish boy, are succumbing to the anti-Jewish propaganda that now dominates their world. Karl and Walter are no longer friends at all, and Hetty is fast becoming convinced of her own racial superiority. But for Hetty, that begins to change on the day that she encounters Walter again and feels the strong mutual attraction between them. Theirs, though, is a doomed relationship so powerful that it could result in both Hetty and Walter confined to concentration camps as punishment for daring it. The greatest sin a German woman can commit in the 1930s is to pollute her pure German blood by mixing it with that of a Jew. No excuses, no exceptions.

Louise Fein

Hetty knows exactly what will happen to her and her family if her relationship with Walter is exposed. It will mean the ruination of them all. And Walter knows that exposure would almost certainly end with his death in one of the country’s new concentration camps. But for the next six years, the couple will risk everything in order to keep their relationship alive, hoping all the while that war will end before they are exposed. Soon enough, they learn that this will not be the case.

Bottom Line: Daughter of the Reich is a well-researched combination of historical fiction, psychological thriller, and coming-of-age novel that largely makes for riveting reading. It, however, suffers a bit from the relatively slow pace at which things finally come to a head for the novel’s two main characters – even to the degree that it all starts to seem a little over-repetitive. Too, the novel would have had, I think, a stronger emotional ending (even though it would have been an open-ended one) if its epilogue had been eliminated. Still, Daughter of the Reich has plenty to say about the ease at which politics-as-usual can go bad, and that’s an important message in today’s world.

Review Copy courtesy of Publisher