The German Girl

The German Girl is really a story about two girls; one, Hannah, a 12 year-old living in 1939 Berlin, the other, Anna, a 12 year-old living in 2014 New York City. Anna has never known her father, who was killed in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. So when she receives a package of old family photographs from her great-aunt Hannah, whom shes never met, she and her mother decide to travel to Cuba where Hannah lives and investigate Annas fathers life. There, Anna learns of Hannahs experience as a refugee from Nazi Germany, travelling on the ship St. Louis. The vast majority of the passengers on the St. Louis were Jewish Germans, and they were refused entry in Cuba, the United States, and Canada.

Unfortunately, this book is so frustrating, because there is no emotional power to it. None. And with a subject as inherently emotional as the Holocaust, thats disappointing. Its not an unreadable book, but its unsatisfying. The writing is decent, but it is quite often inconsistent (there are frequent occurrences of the narrator expressing one thing and two sentences later, expressing the exact opposite).
The biggest problem with this book is the characters. Im not of the opinion that characters have to be likeable, but they do have to be interesting, and they do have to be developed, especially in a character-driven novel as this one is. All the characters in The German Girl are superficially developed and often strain credibility. I couldnt care about any of them, because I couldnt understand any of them, because I couldnt KNOW any of them. A few examples

I didnt understand why Alma, Hannahs mother, felt such anger toward Cuba and nothing at all about Germany, the country that expelled her. For that matter, neither did Hannah, and that strikes me as just so odd. Its like their expulsion only impacted them in terms of inconvenience there was never any sense that this family was being ripped from their home. I didnt understand why both Alma and Hannah both simply wallowed, and that makes me angry that they wallowed. Perhaps had I understood their reasoning, I would have felt more compassion for them.
The love story between Hannah and her friend Leo. There is no romantic chemistry between the two, and why should there be? Theyre 12 when this epic love supposedly blossoms. Their love was all told to the reader, not shown at all (which is true of the entire book, actually), and so not only does the relationship fall flat, it makes no sense to me that at the end, Leo is who Hannah thinks of. I just dont buy true love, because I was never allowed to actually SEE Hannahs heart.

Toward the end of the book, Hannah talks a lot about the guilt of the Rosenthals (her family). Wellthere was no set up for this. It only came up at the end of the book, and there were never any indications that Hannah or Alma felt any sort of misplaced guilt about being Jewish, or surviving the trip on the St. Louis, surviving in CubaI really have no idea what guilt their family suffers from. Because, again, I was held so far away from the characters that even if guilt was implied, I couldnt reach it.

And in my view, this is all a problem that results directly from the structure and mechanics of the book. Theres a an idiom in writing show dont tell. And its good advice for a very good reason showing a character by having them act, and feel, gives a deeper, more complete picture of a character than simply telling the reader that Hannah did this, and Alma did that. The author essentially wrote a series of summaries of events, interspersed every so often with live-action scenes. One example is a scene where Hannah apparently has an argument with her brother. Rather than showing the reader the argument, and perhaps revealing character of both, the author simply tells us Though he raised his voice, I responded in a whisper. Well, thats vague. And there are so many scenes like this.

I also found the parallelism of Hannah and Anna to be so heavy-handed as to be irritating. It was done to force a connection between the two rather than organically developing one.

So, with some guilt because its hard to criticize Holocaust stories, I have to say The German Girl was a tremendous let down. Too much distance and shallow treatment for a topic that deserves depth and richness.

Since a very early age I made my mission to read and watch everything related to the Holocaust. And yet I had never heard about the St. Louis and her rejected Jewish passengers until recently. How could that be?

The German Girl talks about a story that many tried to swept under the rug because it speaks of the shared guilt of those who did nothing. Cuba, the United States, Canada. They all rejected the refugees from the St. Louis. Many other countries denied visas to thousands, millions of men, women and children trying to escape prosecution and certain death. We let them die.

The beauty in Armando Lucas Correa’s fascinating book is that we get to know the St. Louis’ story through the eyes of young Hannah Rosenthal and, many years later, her great niece Anna. We walk through the streets of Nazi-dominated Berlin, we run around with her and her best friend Leo as they see the world they know and love crumble around them, we feel their fear. And we wonder who were the worst victims, those who died or those who were left behind.

The 937 passengers of the St. Louis could be just a number. In The German Girl they finally have a voice. Hannah is their voice. Her dreams are their dreams, her heartbreaks are their heartbreaks.

Make the journey with her. Wander along her childhood streets, sail to Cuba, live with her and her memories and ghosts. And get to know the German Girl and try not to cry. I dare you.

In a moving first novel, Armando Lucas Correa tells the story of The German Girl, a tale of the Holocaust loosely based on historical fact. The German girl is Hannah Rosenthal, the blonde, blue-eyed, 11-year-old daughter of a wealthy and prominent Jewish family in Berlin. As Hannah reflects about suffering abuse from her non-Jewish neighbors, We were more German than they were. So it is unsurprising that, after Hannah is accidentally photographed on the street early in 1939, she finds her picture on the cover of a Nazi propaganda magazine, Das Deutsche Mdel, which translates as the German girl.

An unusual perspective on the Holocaust

By extension, the German girl is also Hannahs great-niece, Anna Rosen, who is also 11 years old. Its 2014, and she lives in New York City with her mother, a former Spanish literature professor at Columbia University. Hannah and Annas story is revealed in a series of alternating memories related by the two pre-teens. The scene shifts from Berlin to New York to Havana, with a lengthy stay on board the German ocean liner that brought Hannah and her mother to Havana.

The scenes in Berlin accurately reflect the hatred and brutality of the Nazis directed toward the countrys large Jewish populationand the active complicity of most of their neighbors. But the Holocaust as it is generally described isnt fully in place until well after World War II is underway. Correa writes about the Holocaust from an unusual perspective, never coming near a concentration camp or witnessing mass murder. Most of the action in The German Girl takes place in Berlin and on board the ocean liner in 1939, in New York in 2014, and in Havana over the years from 1939 to 2014. But the specter of the Holocaust is never absent. Every one of the characters in this deeply affecting novel acts under its influence.

The German girls story, chronologically told

Hannah lives in Berlin in a palatial apartment with her heiress mother and her father, an eminent professor and leader within the Jewish community. As the noose tightens around Berlins Jews, Hannahs father finally succeeds in buying the necessary visas for the family to enter Cuba and later the U.S. as well as first-class passage on the liner St. Louis. Their two-week passage to Havana is largely pleasantuntil the Cuban government invalidates their visas and denies them the right to land. Somehow, the professor arranges privately to allow Hannah and her mother to disembark. They consider their stay in Havana to be temporary, but it proves to be permanent. In 2014, Hannahs great-niece Anna visits Havana with her mother in hopes of learning about her father, who disappeared before Anna was even born. In the weeks they spend with the now 87-year-old Hannah, Anna learns the answers to some of the many secrets surrounding the Rosenthal/Rosen family. In the course of the womens recollections, we also learn a good deal about life in Cuba before, during, and after the Revolution.

The historical background

As Correa relates in an Authors Note at the conclusion of this novel, the journey of the ocean liner St. Louis that rests at the core of this story really took place. At eight in the evening of Saturday, May 13, 1939, the transatlantic liner St. Louis of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie (HAPAG) set sail from the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. Most were in transit to the United States; they possessed American visas but had not yet been cleared to enter the country.

The St. Louis was carrying 900 passengers, the vast majority of them German-Jewish refugees, and 231 crew. All but a handful of those passengers were refused entry into Cuba, even though they held valid entry visas. Then, both the United States and Canada turned them away, too. World War II had not yet begun, and none of the three governments wished to antagonize increasingly powerful Nazi Germany. Anti-Semitism played a major role in the refusal, too. Many weeks later, after intense negotiations, the nearly 900 remaining passengers were released from the ship in Antwerp, from which they traveled to Great Britain, France, Holland, and destinations in Belgium. As Correa notes, Only the 287 taken in by Great Britain were safe. Most of the remainder of the former St. Louis passengers suffered the horrors of war or were exterminated in Nazi concentration camps.

This is a fictional tale centred around Hannah, a young German Jewish girl, escaping Nazi Germany in 1939 along with almost 1,000 others on the all too factual MS St Louis.
I think the tragic story of the MS St Louis is well known and, therefore, do not think there any spoilers in referring to it.
Its Jewish passengers, most of whom were from Germany and were escaping oppression, abuse and inhuman treatment at the hands of the Nazis, were carrying Cuban entry visas, for which they had paid a very high price, issued by the Cuban Immigration Service, headed by the corrupt Manuel Bentez, a close associate of the head of the Cuban army, Fulgencio Batista, who went on to overthrow the Cuban government and establish himself as the dictator of Cuba, until overthrown by Fidel Castro and his rebel movement.
Whilst the MS St Louis was in transit from Hamburg to Havana, the “Bentez” visas were invalidated and less than 40 of the escapees were allowed to land in Cuba; the Captain took his ship to America but the escapees were not allowed to land; then to Canada, where again the escapees were not allowed to land; eventually he returned to Europe; approximately one quarter of the escapees were taken in by Britain and survived the war; the remainder were landed in mainland Europe and died at the hands of the Nazis.
Hannah, who was one of the ones landed in Cuba, survived – to say any more would present spoilers but there is a lot more to it.
This is a powerful, moving, tragic story but told brilliantly.

An enjoyable well written read. The story is like a wheel rotating its way through tragedy, irony, hope and disappointment whilst travelling along the linear metric of time. An affluent German jewish family suffer the persecution of Nazi Germany and seek escape – with hundreds of other jews – to the USA on the steam ship St Louis. Using this historical backdrop, the author weaves a narrative through the eyes of a young lass (The German Girl). The USA will not take the family and the ship diverts to Cuba, who in turn reject the majority of the jews on board but our family do manage to disembark in Cuba, where most of the family remain trapped and isolated for decades, waiting. Years later ….. well I suggest you read the book and find out. You will not be disappointed but I suspect you will be moved.

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