BRAGs

This is a very occasional listing.

Novelist (and more) Martin Amis has gone beyond niceties in the acknowledgments in his penultimate novel, The Zone of Interest. “For the tics and rhythms of German speech my principal guide was Alison Owings and her Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Time and again Owings probes, coaxes, humours and inveigles her way into cosy intimacy with a wide range of housewives, heroines, diehards, dissenters, ex-prisoners, ex-guards. Her subjects are historically anonymous except for one; and the centrepiece of this amusing, frightening, and consistently illuminating book is a long interview, in Vermont, with Freya von Moltke, close to half a century after the execution of her husband.”
Amis then goes on to quote several paragraphs from that chapter. Mensch! I do take exception to “inveigles,” though.
I thank Liz Rosner for initially telling me about the Amis praise.

Thanks to voracious World-War-II reader Tony Dingman, I learned that the 2014 novel, Motherland, by Maria Hummel, includes in her acknowledgments five books that helped her. They end with, “Alison Owings’s landmark oral history, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich.” Frauen is also cited as an influence in Jessica Shattuck’s novel, The Women in the Castle (currently in production as a movie), and Jenna Blum’s novel, Those Who Save Us.

In an interview with “The New York Times,” Wendy Lower, author of the new book Hitler’s Furies : German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields —  quoted Frauen as one of four books in English that especially informed her research. Thanks to Kimberly Burns for tweeting it to my attention.
(‏@kimberlyburnspr Oct 14 Ordinary Women: Wendy Lower Talks About ‘Hitler’s Furies’, via @nytimes w/shout out for @alisonowings http://nyti.ms/17pUCHK
And in Hitler’s Furies itself, Lowry cites Frauen in her notes.)