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Magda by Meike Ziervogel (view source)
Revision as of 11:14, 5 September 2020
, 11:14, 5 September 2020no edit summary
{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Magda
|author=Meike Ziervogel
|publisher=Salt Publishing
|date=March 2013
|summary=An interesting, if flawed, factional look at a rarefied maternal figure, and the women either side of her on the family tree.
|cover=1907773401
|aznuk=1907773401
|aznus=1907773401
}}
Meet a woman who, despite praying to remain virginal, had seven children. Meet a woman whose mother thought her ''hoity-toity'', and spoilt, and who thought she should go to work in a factory at school age to know her place better. Meet a woman of whom her oldest daughter would write ''I don't care what Mother says. Mother isn't always right. No, she definitely isn't.'' All three women are, of course, one and the same, and they're Magda Goebbels, the woman who epitomised more than anyone the Nazi wife.
If anything, the middle is too strong, for the character that is most alive on the page is Helga. You can't escape the blurb and what it defines as the intended thrust of the book – the continuance of evil within the family, down the female line. Handily, Magda's character is still far too complex to be defined as tritely as 'evil'. She did experience nastiness as a child, according to this, and might have acted high and mighty and with too much juvenile profligacy as a teenager, but did not exactly fail to be a maternal figure until the shocking end. Her biggest crime might have been simply that of deluded fantasy, as it's implied here she saw herself, her husband Joseph Goebbels and Hitler as a new variant on Mary, Joseph and the Holy Spirit.
That brings us to the issue with Magda – to what extent was she a Nazi, a brood-mare for the Third Reich and for Hitler and his closest colleague, and to what extent can she be identified as a female character? Certainly , I know a lot more about the Nazi regime than I do about women's issues, and for me , the book still has great validity in looking at the minutiae of this fictionalised Frau Goebbels. There is definitely, as intended, a great welter of interesting details for the feminist thinker to wade through too. But even with our sympathies put too much towards Helga I don't think the book was an outstanding success at discussing the clammy, controlling hand of maternity, or the nightmares that can turn that grip into a lethal one. Ziervogel can certainly write fiction, it's perhaps her decision to go down the route of faction with such a convoluted, noted example that allows the punch of this vivid short book to be not quite what it should.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy. We also have a review of [[Kauthar by Meike Ziervogel]].
For more faction regarding leading Nazis, one of the books of 2012 according to many was [[HHhH by Laurent Binet]].