Wunderland by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Jennifer Cody Epstein’s recently released pre-WWII novel Wunderland startles with its power and intimacy. This gripping story helps us understand on a human level how the horrors of WWII happened.  Epstein shines a light on the friendship of two German girls and their responses to the Nazi party’s obsessive focus on blood purity and Anti-Semitic fervor. Rather than offer economic, political or military analysis of the rise of Nazism, Epstein’s novel offers us a perch to observe the reactions of Ilse Von Fischer and Renate Bauer to the increasing influence of the Nazis and the escalating brutality toward the Jewish population. One young woman joins the Nazi youth movement and the other is denied. The demise of their friendship serves as a metaphor for the devolution of the once positive relationship between diverse peoples living in Germany.

The novel opens in New York in 1989. Ava Fischer has received a package from her estranged mother’s attorney. The parcel contains her mother’s ashes and a series of letters that Ilse had written, but never sent, to her best friend Renate. Through these letters, Ava learns about her mother’s nefarious wartime activities and gains clarity about her complicated paternity.

After the devastation of the First World War and the resulting depression, Germans feel beaten down and seek both saviors and scapegoats. Ilse and Renate each respond to the chaos and lawlessness differently. When Jewish kids are mocked, denigrated and expelled from schools, Renate and Ilse don’t like the sadistic cruelty, but it doesn’t affect their lives.

In 1933, the year of Hitler’s election, Ilse and Renate are in their early teens living in Bremen, Germany. They are best friends. They wear friendship rings, walk home from school and support each other. By 1938, when random violence and smoldering hatred emerges in their town, they become young women who must choose how they will meet the moment

Ilse is soon seduced by peer pressure and a desire to find a bigger meaning in her life. She joins the NDF, a Hitler youth organization and encourages Renate, to join them as well. In a vivid scene, the German official tells Renate she is ineligible because the German authorities discovered her father’s deceased parents were Jewish. Ilse is already brainwashed, “You can’t join because you’re not a part of the new Germany.  You can’t be.  I know that’s not your fault, but it’s the truth.  We can’t just pretend that it’s not.”  Ilse could have expressed outrage, empathy and solidarity with Renate, but she does not. She embraces Hitler’s vision for a new Germany and betrays Renate’s family because of her narcissism, lack of empathy and a growing appetite for cruelty.

Epstein’s shows us through the lives of these young women how contemptuous comments directed at Jews before the war escalated into the horrors of Jewish extermination during the war. She captures the betrayal by the German people of their Jewish neighbors by writing of Ilse’s betrayal of her once dear friend Renate.

Because the novel begins and ends in 1989, there is a sense of hope for Ana. She better understands her mother’s distant personality and her grievous actions as a Nazi propagandist. Though the novel is painful, Epstein has added another dimension to our understanding of how civilized people descended into madness. Ana will eventually make peace with her mother’s past and stop the patterns in the next generation. Given the current invective in our national politics, Wunderland serves as a warning that silence in the face of denigrating and derisive language toward minority groups can lead to violence and tragedy.