The Girl From Munich. Tania Blanchard

Published: Simon & Schuster (Australia)
Date: 1st September 2017
Format: e-ARC
Pages: 352
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Rating:
                 
Growing up in Hitler’s Germany, Charlotte von Klein has big dreams for the future. Her mind is full of plans for a sumptuous wedding to her childhood sweetheart Heinrich while working for the Luftwaffe, proudly giving her all for the Fatherland.

But in 1943, the tide of the war is turning against Germany, and Lotte’s life of privilege and comfort begins to collapsing around her. As Hitler’s Reich abandons Germany and the country falls to the Allied forces, Lotte is forced to flee from the unfolding chaos to the country with the darkly attractive Erich Drescher, her Luftwaffe superior.

The Girl From Munich is set in Germany during WW11 and post war. It shows the lives of the ordinary people as they too coped with the war that their "beloved" Fuhrer had led them into. Lotte was one young woman who believed in the cause and wanted to help where she could and escape the confines surrounding her from her mother and others.  She is a keen photographer, however that has all to fall by the wayside as war sets limits on film. She is expected to marry Heinrich, a young doctor and life long friend. Although Lotte notices some things just don't sit right with her, even though she does have love for him.

We follow Lotte through the last three years of the war, and in doing so see Germany coping with bombs being dropped on them, losing loved ones to the battlefield and not being able to find loved ones in other areas. Lotte like many believes what she has been indoctrinated with, until finally she realises what others might be saying could be true.  So often we see the war from the eyes of the allied forces, so I really liked being given the chance to empathise with those also caught up in war on the other side. It also highlighted for me the unswerving and unthinking loyalty that some give to a leader, blinkered - and it is happening today, which is the sad thing, many have not learned from our past.

This is a coming of age story for Lotte, a valuing of herself and a learning to trust her own heart and instincts.  I liked her courage, fortitude and ability to keep going.  Her relationship with Heinrich comes into question when she finds herself attracted to Erich, and it is this relationship that helps Lotte blossom into the person she becomes.

This is a debut novel written by Tania Blanchard, she is an Australian with an Italian father and a German mother. She was fascinated by the stories her German grandmother told her, and for me that gives this book a ring of truth, an inheritance that she shares in a work of fiction. I am pleased to see she intends writing a book to continue this story in the new chosen land, and I for one will be looking out for it.

As it happens I saw on a current events TV programme a piece interviewing an Austrian Willi Huber who came to New Zealand to see Mt Cook, in the Sth Island. He was an SS soldier at 17 and was a gunner on a tank until in hand to hand combat he received a bayonet wound. He is 94 now and was instrumental in setting up the ski slope at Mount Hutt. What struck me was the similarities in the history in this book and his story. It added to the realism of the book for me, plus I was hooked into his amazing story.