Stone Mother
In May 1945, stripped of arrogance and conceit, thrown out of their homes and left to stumble in the ruins of their thousand-year Reich, Germans awakened to a different kind of nightmarish reality. Homelessness, starvation, rape. Loathed by the world and by themselves. The sham innocence failed. Such was the world of those Germans who served the Nazis, obeyed them or stayed silent while millions of their citizens were led to the slaughter.
But what of the generation of children born at the end of the war? What was their world like, raised by parents and neighbors all of whom had secrets? Stone Mother centers around the three children of Vati, a respected doctor, and his wife, a mother prone to violent physical outbursts.
Marie is the youngest of the siblings, inquisitive, sensitive, a budding intellect. Despite her innocence, she takes the brunt of her mother’s anger. Her other “stone mother” is the castle she is raised in, filled with mystery and a connection to her distant past. When her devoted father vanishes from her life and she becomes the ward of her mother, Marie enters the shadowy world of her elders. She and her brother and sister are uprooted, forced into poverty, and confronted by cruelty that hasn’t quite left the land. Can they survive physically and mentally intact?
Stone Mother takes a unique look at the innocents of the aftermath of hell. It reads much like a diary, taking Marie from the age of four into her teenage years. What is normal under such circumstances? Truths are revealed about the war and about her family. Can she forgive her mother? Can she make sense of this world? Stone Mother is a well-crafted story depicting a generation of children whose innocence was tattered before they were even born.
