From war to fiction: ‘I didn’t care about AK-47s, I cared about people’

Is it daring for an Irish writer to attempt the story of an ordinary German couple during the second World War? It's a question former journalist Audrey Magee grappled with when writing her debut novel, The Undertaking .

“I struggled with this concept because I’m not Jewish and I’m not German. I walk near my house in Co Wicklow and every day I would have this argument with myself.

“Of course you can tell yourself that art has no boundaries, you have every right to pursue it, it’s literature. It’s not enough: you’re still treading on people’s souls, people’s history, people’s lives.”

Treading carefully is a familiar position for Magee, who previously visited conflict zones as a journalist for The Irish Times and the London Times .

“You’re definitely in other people’s territory,” she says of the novel’s setting, “but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you see it in a way someone closer can’t. Foreign correspondents who come to write about Ireland often hit the nail on the head.

"When I worked for the Times I learned to write about Ireland for an outside audience. That gave me courage, too."

A formative experience
As with much writing, early experiences were formative in what would become the subject matter of The Undertaking . This included an encounter outside Dachau near Munich more than 20 years ago.

Magee, then studying German and French at UCD, and on exchange in Germany, found herself interpreting between a Jewish-American man visiting the former concentration camp and an elderly German woman who had spent her life near the walls of Dachau.

“He didn’t speak any German and she didn’t speak any English, so I was interpreting. She told us she had lived there, outside the camp’s perimeter, all her life. He couldn’t believe this; how she could have stayed there throughout. She said she knew nothing.

“They were so polarised, both unable to concede an inch because, if he did, he betrayed his family and, if she did, her life came tumbling down. She was protected, at least to herself, within that zone of not knowing. That was a mind-blowing experience. There was no middle ground between these two people.

“If you find yourself interpreting, you find yourself suddenly in the middle of really intensive emotions, none of which are your own.

“It’s different from journalism because you’re embedded in a pitch battle, but not as an observer: you’re a go-between, so you’re more involved than you are in journalism. And yet it doesn’t belong to you.”

This idea of translation, of speaking on behalf of the other, witnessing but withdrawing comment, feeds directly into the style of the prose, which is almost entirely dialogue and rarely allows an authorial narrative-voice to enter.

“I wanted to depict but never to judge,” says Magee. “I came at it because I needed to understand how something to this degree can happen to a bunch of very ordinary, nice people. Everyone feels they know it, but do we really know it?

“It hasn’t happened to that extreme, but I was in Bosnia, I was in Northern Ireland, in Rwanda. You see the same patterns of behaviour. We seem to hurtle towards these things, generation after generation. Why are we doing this to each other? That’s what I wanted to explore.”

The exploration takes the shape of an “unashamedly simple story: boy meets girl”. The narrative follows the Spinnell family in Berlin and the relationship between their daughter, Katharina Spinnell, and German soldier Peter Faber, who is fighting on the Eastern Front.

Desperate for relief from army duties, Faber marries Spinnell, a woman he has never met, to secure 10 days of honeymoon leave. Spinnell’s motivations are financial.

The novel opens with the couple’s wedding ceremony happening simultaneously but apart, on a Russian campsite and in Berlin, using a photograph in place of the absent other.

A real-life account
The startling image of wartime, mail-order marriage isn't fiction, says Magee, who met a former German soldier in west Cork who told her this exact account.

“Everything came tumbling at me, all these years of this thing. It brought everything together. I had this story and I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I left journalism and started to write.”

It was a story she didn’t think she could tackle adequately in journalistic form. “Journalism is all about knowing, but I wanted to understand. What I saw in journalism a lot was a focus on the weaponry of war: how many AK-47’s were used? How many weapons did the IRA have? You see it in history books too, with a focus on military strategy. What they’re doing is allowing themselves to be removed from the true impact of those weapons, of those strategies.

“To some degree, it’s a male way of dealing with things; you stay up at this level and don’t look at the domestic side, the psychological impact on people’s lives. I didn’t care about how many AK-47s they had, I cared about people whose kitchen tables I was sitting at who’d lost people because of the bomb. It is easier to remove yourself from the impact because the impact is horrendous and it goes on for generations.”

As she speaks, images of post-second World War battles with AK-47 rifles and those from the Northern Ireland Troubles, events such as Omagh, which Magee reported on, collapse in on each other signalling perhaps a wider scope to her concerns than solely Germany or Stalingrad.

“It brings us back to the lady outside Dachau: did she know something and what could she have done? To some degree we’re absolutely guilty, now, because we know what’s going on in Syria and what do we do? We sit and drink tea. To some degree we’re in the same position as that woman.

“It was very easy to polarise the Germans for what they did, but in modern times are we behaving much differently in terms of not doing anything? Because we do know and yet it goes on. We knew so much about Bosnia and it went on so long before we did anything.

“If you don’t understand, you repeat the same mistakes. That war, for a very long time, has been broken down into victory, defeat, the enemy, the wonderful Allies, the them, the us; it’s led to so many generations of pigeon-holing. As long as you keep pigeon-holing, you’re getting nowhere.”

And yet for someone on a mission to investigate and understand, she won’t make sense of it for her readers, preferring them to draw their own conclusions.

“I didn’t want the texture to feel like everything is explained to you. I wanted the reader to interact. I personally interact much more with a Picasso line drawing than I do with a landscape, because there’s a space for your imagination. It was very important to me to create that space.”

The Undertaking is published by Atlantic Books