Ausländer

Although he lives in Poland, Peter is volksdeutscher (of German blood) and, with his blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like a perfect Aryan according to the criteria laid down by Nazi racial ideologues. When Peter’s parents are killed by the Russian troops he is taken for adoption by a Berlin professor of eugenics. Longing to fit in and feel secure, Peter tries to like his adoptive family and to be a loyal member of the Hitler-Jugend but a friendship with Anna, whose parents have independent minds, opens his eyes to what is going on around him.

Dowswell is an accomplished historian and his characters serve to represent different aspects of life under the Nazis. There is eight-year-old Charlotte and her dolls’ house with its miniature swastikas and pictures of Hitler on the walls; her eldest sister Elsbeth who has worked in a clinic where people with mental disabilities are murdered; and their father Professor Kaltenbach who researches into ways of distinguishing Aryan from Jew using human specimens. As a counterpoint there is Anna’s father Colonel Otto Reiter who is opposed to the Nazi regime and Frau Weber who hides Jews in her attic. That the inner life of these characters remains undeveloped is not surprising, defined as they are by their response to the society they live in and the weight of its history.

Dowswell brings a freshness to his account (as I find myself thinking of this almost documentary fiction). Berlin comes alive as Peter and Anna stroll along Unter den Linden, take the U-bahn or enter one of its large apartment blocks. Extraordinary details (Charlotte’s dolls’ house which actually exists) trap the reader in this terrible and terrifying world that Peter struggles to understand and from which he must eventually escape. Events proceed at a cracking pace and Dowswell maintains the tension until the final page. Hard to put down.