4 out of 5 stars
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How I discovered this book: I saw that Lorraine of @ReviewCafe blog had, on Twitter, named the whole trilogy as the best books she read in 2021 - that was enough for me!
In a Nutshell: Germany, from 1933 to the beginning of WW2, from the POV of a German general and his Jewish staff.
This is a long book, and quite an achievement; it's the most detailed fictional account of this period that I've ever read. It is set in the city of Kiel in northern Germany, and shows how the persecution of the Jews developed so gradually over the years, how Hitler was perceived when he first came to power, and the way in which the idea of war sneaked up on everyone. It certainly increased my knowledge about the period, generally.
I very quickly became invested in the main characters - General Erich Kästner and his family, and Yosef and Miriam Nussbaum, his driver/handyman and cook/housekeeper. Also Ruth Nussbaum, Yosef and Miriam's daughter, from whom the account derives. Some characters and places are real, some are fictional; there is an explanation at the beginning of the book. All the main characters were clearly defined, so I was interested in their stories.
One aspect I liked very much was how some chapter topics were heralded by memos between official personnel - mostly to General Kästner from his superiors and colleagues - informing each other of the Führer's plans, or by articles in either the Kiel morning paper or the underground publication distributed by Jews. Later, information is given to the reader in this way via letters between Miriam and her friend Esther, who escaped to Palestine, and between their children. These short, sharp shocks (particularly via the memos and the Morgenpost) built suspense so well, and gave a nice variation to the text.
More than any other book I've read on the subject, The Gathering Storm illustrates how the restrictions placed on the Jews were introduced so slowly that they became almost resigned to such persecution. Similarly, we see how the ordinary people were manipulated to see the Jew as the cause of all the country's problems, a subspecies, dirty, untrustworthy, etc. In effect, there was little difference between those who joined in wholeheartedly with the persecution and those who turned a blind eye and went along with it for the sake of their own safety. Most of all, though, this book answered the question asked by so many: why did most of the Jews just accept what was happening?
I saw the reason for their perceived passive reaction as not only fear and lack of options, but also the fact that they didn't know how bad it was going to get. Had they been told that within the next decade six million of them would be murdered in concentration camps, the entire country might have reacted differently to those first changes in the law. Each time there was a lull in the violence and trouble, the characters hoped that everything had 'settled down now'. They clung onto little glimmers of hope, onto rumours that Hitler would be ousted; all they had to do was wait. The characters would assure each other that it couldn't get much worse.
'It is hard to believe that something of that nature can happen in our country in the twenty-first century' - Yosef, about the murder of a Jewish doctor in 1933.
'Once the country is stabilised we'll return to normal, surely?' - Mrs Kästner, justifying her vote for Hitler, when her husband criticised one of the new laws giving him absolute power.
The population was kept in the dark, never knowing what was true and what was rumour, gradually being desensitised to the cruelty, believing that the Jews should not 'expect to be able to move around with impunity, endangering the German people'. Soon civilians who had swallowed all the propaganda were doing much of the job for Hitler and his men, via discrimination, violence, damage of property, etc.
I did like this book a lot, and will definitely read the next one in the trilogy, but I felt it could have been cut down by at least a quarter. I was in awe of the extensive research, but at times I felt that it was perhaps a little over-researched. There are long, detailed chapters about sailing and boat races in which the Kästners were involved that seemed to be there only to show that the author knows about sailing and boat races. The 1936 Olympics seemed to go on forever, important though it was because of the attitudes towards Jesse Owens. The other aspect I was not so keen on was that much of the story is told in dialogue - it's used to convey information, incidents often being reported in conversation after the event, rather than the scene being shown, which made for less impact. For instance, Yosef's experience of a riot outside the British Consulate in which many Jewish citizens were assaulted by the Nazis was dealt with in one paragraph; it could have been an excellent scene. I actually found the memos and news items at the start of the chapters more foreboding and atmospheric than the rest of the book.
It's a novel that I'd recommend if you're interested in the subject matter, but I did feel it needed an editor with the sort of eye that prunes superfluous detail; not all research needs to make it into the book, and the proofreader did not pick up on the fairly frequent misuse of the word 'I' when it should have been 'me' (a minor bugbear of mine!). Looking at the other reviews, though, it seems that not being completely blown away by The Gathering Storm puts me in a minority of one (!!), so you may want to disregard my thoughts. It is, as I said, jolly good on the whole - I've already bought the next book and am looking forward to seeing what happens next for the Kästners and the Nussbaums.
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