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A conversation with bestselling author Chris Bohjalian about his novel,
Skeletons at the Feast
Skeletons at the Feast was inspired by an actual World War II
diary. How did you find out about this diary? What about it led you to write
this book?
Like most of my novels, the idea for Skeletons at the Feast emerged
from the minutiae of everyday life. There was a little girl in my daughter's
kindergarten class here in Vermont, and one day her father, Gerd Krahn, asked me
if I would look at his German grandmother's unpublished diary. His mother had
just finished translating it into English. This was back in 1998.
Usually, this sort of request is a novelist's worst nightmare: Most family
histories are dull as toast and badly written. But Gerd is a very good friend of
mine, and so I was happy to read the diary that his East Prussian grandmother,
Eva Henatsch, kept from 1920 through 1945.
Much of the diary focused upon the day-to-day activities of helping to manage a
sizable estate in a remote, still rural corner of Europe. But then there were
the passages that chronicled 1945 and Eva's family's arduous trek west ahead of
the Soviet Army – a journey that was always grueling and often terrifying. I was
fascinated. But I still didn't anticipate that it would ever inspire me to
embark upon a novel.
Eight years later, however, in 2006, I read Max Hastings's history of the last
year of the war in Germany, Armageddon, and I was struck by how often the
anecdotes in Hastings's nonfiction account mirrored moments in that diary.
Apparently, the horrors in Henatsch's diary were not unique. But nor were the
moments of idiosyncratic human connection – such as the occasional friendships
(and even romances) that grew between Allied prisoners of war who were sent to
the farms in East Prussia to help with the harvest and the teenage German farm
girls there. It was thus almost out of intellectual curiosity that I asked Gerd
if I could revisit his grandmother's diary. It was on that second reading that I
began to imagine a novel.
As the author of eleven novels you have written about a wide range of
subjects, though your last book The Double Bind and now Skeletons at
the Feast were inspired by a real life story or person. Does having a back
story make writing a novel more challenging? Do you actively seek real life
stories that inspire you?
I've been lucky: I've never had to actively seek a story. They've always
appeared right in my backyard – even this new book, which is set in another part
of the world in another era.
Of course, it's important to note that although characters in Skeletons at
the Feast endure some of the same trials as Eva Henatsch and her remarkable
family, Irmgard Emmerich – Mutti in my novel – is not Eva. Nor is Anna Emmerich,
my principal heroine, a recreation of Eva's daughter, Heidi. I hope the
fictional Mutti and Anna have a semblance of Eva's and Heidi's monumental
courage and resiliency and compassion, but they are nonetheless fictional
constructs.
So, I would say it is helpful to have an inspiration to get me excited about a
period or an idea. But there is still the hard work of imaging a story and a
people, and constructing a compelling fictional world.
Your novels tend to center on ordinary people who find themselves trapped in
extraordinarily difficult situations, and clearly that is true of this book as
well. Beyond that, how would you compare Skeletons at the Feast to your
other work?
It's quite different in that it's set in a particular historical moment. But
it still shares some specific universalities with my other work: Ordinary people
coping with trials they had never before imagined; young people coming of age in
moments of seemingly unbearable stress; and, I hope, the sorts of moral
ambiguity that give us all pause and force us to examine our values.
You bring to life in vivid detail an aspect of WWII that we haven't heard a
lot about: the frenzied evacuation of the Germans as the Eastern front crumbled
and the Russians advanced. What research did you draw on to learn more about
this part of history?
The last six months of the Second World War in Poland and the eastern edges
of Germany had to have been one of the most horrific periods in human history.
The magnitude of the carnage is almost inconceivable. There were concentration
camps that were still functioning; there were the starving, desperately ill
prisoners from other camps whom the Nazis were marching west in the cold; there
were the Russian soldiers dying in monumental numbers since a part of the
Russian military strategy was simply attrition; there were the German soldiers
fighting like cornered wolves because they knew they didn't dare surrender after
the atrocities their army had committed across the Soviet Union; and then there
were the terrified German civilians – women and children and old people –
plodding west ahead of the advancing Russian army.
The scope of the crucible is always brought home to me by one single moment: The
sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 30, 1945. The former cruise ship was
the very last vessel to leave the surrounded East Prussian port of Gotenhafen,
and so over 10,000 frantic evacuees fought their way aboard. (Think for a moment
of those images we've all seen of the last helicopters leaving Saigon in 1975 as
the North Vietnamese were arriving – then move that chaos to a port and multiply
it a thousand times over.) The ship was quickly sunk by a Russian submarine, and
over 9,500 people went to the bottom of the Baltic – or six times the number of
people who died on the Titanic.
In any case, I did a great deal of secondary research. But the most important
details in the new novel came from my interviews with Holocaust survivors –
including individuals who endured those horrific winter death marches – and with
Germans who were alive in the period. Their stories always were wrenching.
The three principal characters in Skeletons—Anna, the young woman from the
well-to-do Prussian family; Callum, the Scottish POW; and Uri, the Jewish man
passing himself off as a German soldier—are all so different. Which was the most
challenging character for you?
I think it was Callum, the Scottish POW. Anna and Uri have their secrets and
their guilts and their inner demons, and so they were always interesting to me.
But Callum? In the novel he's barely 20 when he's captured, and he never even
fired his weapon in battle before being captured. He was, in some ways, almost
too good at first. Too unambiguous. He proved to be a bit of a challenge.
Are you already at work on your next novel? Any hints as to what it's about?
I am, yes. It's a love story – in some ways, a retelling of "Romeo and
Juliet" – set in Florence and Tuscany toward the end of the Second World War.
It's the second book in my planned World War Two trilogy. The first of the
books, of course, is Skeletons at the Feast. The final of the three will
be set on one of the Channel Islands.
An Interview with Chris Bohjalian, about Midwives
Q: What made you choose to write a book about a midwife?
A: It wasn't so much midwifery that interested me as it was drama.
About six months after my daughter was born--a perfectly fine hospital
delivery--I was at a dinner party here in rural Vermont where I live, and I met
the local lay midwife. She started teasing me very good-naturedly about the fact
that my wife and I had traveled 32.4 miles to that hospital in the middle of the
night to have our baby.
"If you had used me," she said, smiling, "you could have had
your little girl at your home in Lincoln. Your bedroom, if you wanted. And you
could have caught her."
I'd never heard the verb "catch" in the context of birth, and I
grew fascinated. Then, as she told me little bits about her life--the sensations
of delivering (or "catching") a baby in a bedroom, the wonderful drama
that seems to attend almost any birth--I became hooked. Sitting beside me, I
realized, was a woman who saw more sobbing men than any other professional I was
likely to meet. After all, she was there from the moment a labor began until the
baby arrived. She witnessed the absolutely momentous roller-coaster of emotion
that seems to accompany every birth.
Of course I also learned in my research that midwives who specialize in home
birth also shoulder enormous responsibility. They deliver babies far from the
medical safety net we take for granted. Clearly they're extraordinary people,
and clearly they're immensely gifted. But it is still a very special woman who
can help a laboring mother remain focused and composed when the pain is intense
and there's no epidural on the horizon. It's a rare woman indeed who--as one
midwife who helped me with the book actually did--can successfully deliver a
breech in a bedroom, with the knowledge that failure will result in head
entrapment and death.
Q: Your book, Midwives, is a dramatic story of a midwife who stands trial
for manslaughter. Is this based upon a true story?
A: No. Fortunately, it is not.
But lay midwives are nevertheless beleaguered in many states. A season
doesn't seem to go by when a lay midwife isn't on trial somewhere for simply
doing what she has done fabulously well for years: Catch babies. Yet in the eyes
of much of the medical community, she's "practicing medicine without a
license," and subject to a prosecution that borders often on persecution.
Q: You give such descriptive details of the home-birthing process, did you
actually work with a midwife to get such perspective?
A: I interviewed roughly 65 people while researching Midwives. I spent
time with midwives and ob-gyns, prosecutors and defense attorneys, and literally
dozens of people who had their babies at home.
Without exception, the midwives were wonderful: Forthcoming and honest, and
rich with stories. Not only were they unfailingly patient (clearly a part of the
job description), but they were very comfortable talking about the joys and
risks that mark their profession.
Q: What reaction have you gotten from midwives about your book?
A: When the book was first published in hardcover, some midwives
thought I was Satan. It's just that simple. There were some who thought I was
the single worst thing to happen to birth since forceps.
And that's understandable: Few midwives are going to be wild about the notion
of a novel in which a woman dies in a home birth, and is then tried for
manslaughter.
But the midwives who read the book for me in manuscript form and who helped
me with my research really loved it. They read it is a novel about the strength
of one woman and one family, and they read it as a courtroom drama.
And once the book was a few months old, a great many midwives started backing
the book, and--like me--really caring for my fictional midwife, Sibyl Danforth.
Midwives is my fifth novel, and I've never loved a character as much as I loved
Sibyl. (I'm working very hard to convince myself my infatuation is healthy.)
Moreover, I do not believe it will scare anyone away from home birth. When I
was touring with the hardcover, a great many mothers came to my readings with
their little babies born at home, and told me how the book had reinforced their
faith in midwifery, home birth, and the love a midwife brings to the experience.
They had really cherished the novel.
Q: After writing this book, would you and your wife consider using a
midwife at the birth of your next child?
A: In a heartbeat. My wife and I would be very comfortable having a
baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.
Certainly we'd see an ob-gyn in the beginning as well, to make sure that
Victoria (my wife) was a good candidate for a midwife-attended birth. But
assuming it was a low-risk pregnancy, we'd be eager to call our neighbor--now
friend and neighbor--who happens to be a midwife, and ask her to help us have
our baby.
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