Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Avon Books UK, and author Daisy Wood for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
There are so many historical fiction books out there set during events leading up to and during the Second World War that there is plenty to choose from. I can appreciate that it can be hard to find an original way to look at events during that time period. I thought perhaps I’d found it in The Banned Books of Berlin. Instead, I felt like I was reading a sanitized version of the story from the musical Cabaret.
The story takes place during two timelines, nearly one hundred years apart. In 2024, Maddie is making a visit home to Los Angeles, where her mother, brother, and grandfather live. Gramps is getting up there in years and has taken it upon himself to start clearing out his stuff so his family won’t have to do it when he’s gone. Gramps’ mother immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1930s and raised him on her own after her husband was killed in France during the war, or at least that’s the story that has been told in the family until now.
In Germany in the 1930s, we are introduced to Freya Amsel. Her mother has just died, and with her dying breath, she told Freya to find her wings and get out. Freya isn’t sure, and at first steps into her mother’s dressmaking business and takes care of the home she shares with her father and brother. They take her for granted, and stepping into the family business was never something Freya wanted to do. Eventually, she takes a stand and shuts down her mother’s business to take a job as a wardrobe assistant in a cabaret club.
Most of the book is about Freya and her time in Berlin as Hitler is rising to power. Freya’s mother taught her to value books, and Freya has always dreamed of being a writer, although she’s not sure how to pursue that goal. Violet, one of the dancers at the club, introduces Freya to Wolfgang, who is a bohemian author. Freya finds herself enjoying time away from work with his unconventional group of writers in Berlin. The actual book banning and burning actually doesn’t happen until the end of the book.
The title alone was a bit of a misnomer, as it’s mostly about living in Berlin and working in the cabaret. Violet and Freya don’t completely trust one another. They both love the same man, Leon. In the end, though, Freya comes through for Violet when she needs her. Freya talks about books and ideas being suppressed as Hitler comes to power, which is a cautionary tale for those of us watching what is currently happening in the United States. Once the government begins suppressing ideas it feels are a threat, it’s a slippery slope. The quote Freya repeats is “Those who would burn books would next burn people.” How true that is!
Having lived in New York growing up and seen several incarnations of the musical Cabaret, much of that story felt all too familiar. This version of that story is sanitized compared to the show, although Freya does encounter homosexuals in her circle of bohemian friends in Berlin. I had an idea that there was more to Violet and her behavior than Freya knew, and I eventually learned the whole story.
The 2024 timeline was interesting as Maddie helps her mother, Sharon, cope with an empty nest. Maddie’s brother, Ben, has Down syndrome and has always lived at home. He’s starting to feel that he wants more in life, and Sharon has a hard time letting go. I know from experience how hard it can be as a disabled child grows up and wants some independence. It can be hard to know when to give them room and when to step in. Sharon’s reluctance to look into the past is threatening to her as well, especially when Maddie discovers that the man they believed to be Gramps’ father might not have been after all. There’s also the diversion of Maddie being cyber-bullied about her writing, as well as a budding romance.
The Banned Books of Berlin is not a bad book. I enjoyed reading it. It’s just not that different a take on this era in Germany. I’ve read other historical fiction books that cover the topic, and I’ve seen Cabaret. I can’t say that there was anything new here, and the actual book banning and burning didn’t happen until the book was almost over.
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Categories: Book Reviews
I agree – it’s incredibly difficult to write a truly “original” historical novel set in the 1930s and ’40s that deal, even peripherally, with Hitler, Nazis, World War II, and the Holocaust. It’s a fascinating period, and an important one to remember (especially since fascism is rising in the West, including the U.S.), but it’s also…ahem…omnipresent in literature, movies, the stage, and television. That’s why I abandoned my World War II novel several years ago; it was incredibly difficult to avoid military fiction tropes, and I didn’t think I was adding anything new to the literature of the “good war.”
Also, regarding this novel’s thematic similarities to “Cabaret”: That, too, is one of the pitfalls of telling fictional stories set in the WWII era; lurking in the subconscious of every author with ambitions of writing a historical novel about the “dark times” are fragments of every media product we’ve experienced. I wouldn’t be surprised if Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” (1939) and its eventual Broadway spinoff “Cabaret” were strong influences on Daisy Wood’s plot and themes.
The Isherwood name sounds familiar. I’m wondering if that was one of the “bohemian writers” she met. I couldn’t remember the origins of Cabaret, but I kept thinking the story was eerily similar.
I’ve found a few books that address topics I didn’t know about during the war. One of the best was about the Nazi birthing program and adopting those kids out to “good German families.”
Considering that Christopher Isherwood was a gay British writer living in Weimar-era Berlin and had to leave the country circa 1933-34 after Hitler passed his “Enabling Laws,” your hunch is likely a correct one.
I learned about the SS and its Lebensborn program…oh…in the 1990s or early 2000s when the History Channel was mostly…history. I know more about the purely military aspects of World War II than I do about the inner workings of the Nazi Party and Himmler’s weirder ideas, but I did learn that thanks to cable TV and its trove of documentaries. That’s why when I watched “The Man in the High Castle” a few years back, I wasn’t thrown for a loop by its Lebensborn subplot.