But if you tighten the lens to the point where you are considering the multitude of individual, small and perhaps minor-seeming steps and decisions that cumulatively led to genocide, it suddenly doesn’t seem so removed.”

The other reason Epstein wanted to write about life in the Third Reich was “to try to get into the emotionality and dailyness of the run-up to the Final Solution because when you think of it only in terms of those incomprehensible final chapters I think it’s actually much easier to distance yourself from them-even to fool yourself into a kind of dangerous complacency.

Wunderland is not about the war or the Holocaust but mainly about Germany in the 1930s, as the Nazi ideology took over the nation. Of course by no means all Germans were complicit, but 51 percent voted for the Nazis in the last free election. I also think we are often looking for reassurances that it couldn’t happen again, or to us, or that if it did we as individuals wouldn’t make the same kinds of catastrophic choices.” Calculated, systematic slaughter on that scale simply defies the imagination on some level, and because of that we keep coming back to it, trying (and inevitably failing) to make some sort of emotional sense out of it. Because that was something I’d never really been able to wrap my head around: how ordinary, ostensibly good people in a progressive society allowed themselves to become complicit in something so unequivocally evil. “What I wanted to get at,” she explains, “was how that terrifying metamorphosis happened, what it looked and felt like to ordinary Germans over the relatively slow burn of the Nazi era. Jennifer Cody Epstein explores this challenge in her novel Wunderland (Crown, 2019). How did the Holocaust happen and, more importantly, why? However, the memory still haunts succeeding generations of people around the world. Only a dwindling group of eighty- and ninety-year-olds can remember Nazi Germany and most of them were children at the time. Wunderland by Jennifer Epstein: Nightmare and Awakening

Highland Awakening by Jennifer Haymore