Transcript of Interview with Lucy Becket about A Postcard from the Volcano. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
A Postcard from the Volcano at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1006119/Postcard-from-Volcano-Novel-Pre-War-Germany
———————————
Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of eCommerce for catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs. Today, in the spotlight, we have Lucy Beckett, author of A Postcard from the Volcano. Lucy, glad to have you on the show!
Lucy: I’m delighted to be on your show.
Chris: Now I think you’re our first or you’re our second British author that we’ve had on this show. So you know, I always love having a little different sound coming back to me from the other side of the microphone. Now, you are on this side of the pond though, right now, correct?
Lucy: I’m on this side of the pond. I’ve been to a big conference at Notre Dame which was about virtue, sacrifice, and the common good. And I read a paper there about tragedy.
Chris: I understand. So can you tell us a little bit about a post part…I’m having trouble saying the name of your book. It’s terrible. Can you tell us a little bit about A Postcard from the Volcano?
Lucy: I will happily do that. The novel is set in *** [00:01:40] in Vellmar, Germany, not a happy place to be growing up in and it looks at the lives of a bunch of people who meet as students in the University of Breslau which is a great German city. At the time, the university was second to the University of Berlin in prestige and in Nobel prizes and all that kind of thing and the City of Breslau was completely smashed to pieces in the war. The Germans treated it as their last stronghold in the east before the Russians arrived and they, between them the Russians and the Germans smashed the city to smithereens and after the war, it was placed in the peace settlement in Poland and a part of Germany where my hero, my central character grows up is Silicia which is now also a part of Poland. So it’s a part of Germany that has in one sense, it lost to Germany, all the Germans were moved out of it at the end of war by *** [00:02:46] which now that the Germans know the Poles have quite forgotten but when my story is set, it was a great German city with a long tradition and a venerable university and my bunch of kids meet as students in the 1920’s and my central character who was born in 1905; they were all born between 1900 and 1910 and it was a very difficult generation to grow up in. And my central character was born on an estate, a *** [00:03:23] estate in the countryside in Silicia, a very beautiful place in a beautiful house and his father is a Prussian, a military Prussian king of his sons going into the army and upholding the Prussian tradition but his mother is a musician, a pianist, a beautiful lady who turns out after a while, the boy grows up not knowing this, to come from an assimilated Jewish family so my central character is half-Prussian and half-Jewish and this becomes the very complicated issue as the 20’s go on. And his friends who we learn all about through the string quartet which they play together in Breslau are a mixture of people, one is Polish, one is rural Prussian from East Prussia far to the east, and a brother and sister much closer to rural Jewish life and comes from *** [00:04:27] then in Poland now the capital of Lithuania. And they’d all over had been scarred, one way or another by the First World War which happened when they were children and they have to deal with growing up in a Germany which is turning further and further towards extremism, anti-Semitism, hysterical attitudes as in through Hitler. So it comes to all of that.
Chris: Well that is just a mouthful of a wide range of topics and many of them are kind of uncomfortable for a lot of us especially when you’re talking about the rise of Hitler going on there.
Lucy: It’s not a comfortable book to read but I hope that the good idealism and the courage and the different approaches to all the ideas knocking about at the time of these young people has an inspiring kind of sign. The central character in the course of the story becomes a Catholic partly because his best friend is a Polish Catholic count who starts the book at school as a rather self-conscious nihilist with a lot of Nietzsche ideas floating around in his head and one way or another, he comes back to *** [00:03:52] and eventually becomes a priest. Influenced by his friend and also by a wiser Catholic schoolmaster, very German from Rhineland, very Catholic, my hero decides to become a Catholic which goes against both the traditions in which his parents grew up and that makes difficulties and also makes very good things happen in his life.
Chris: Now, what was it that really drew you to write about this particular time period?
Lucy: Well I hope two things, I think. When I was growing up in England in the 1950’s, I was taught at school by a German refugee who had left Germany not because he was Jewish but because he hated what was happening and found it impossible to stay in Germany and be the *** [00:06:55] of his training that had prepared him to be and he kept doing it and was in turn then was in pioneer corps in the war doing horrible chores for the British Army which was happened to some of the immigrants from Germany and ended up as a schoolteacher teaching music and lessons and I was taught by him and I was fascinated by him. I knew very little about his early life and he died when I was 18 so I have always, all my life, I’m old now; I’m nearly 70, wanted to understand where this man came from and what his early life was like. And when he did *** [00:07:36] on an estate, which I knew had been beautiful things and pictures and things which you don’t spare in the war. And the second thing is that my own mother’s family was a German-Jewish American family and some of the members of the family who were still in Germany disappeared in the Holocaust and I was interested in all of that as well. They were completely assimilated Jews but that, of course, didn’t protect them.
Chris: Now, who is going to be the most interested in this book? Is it going to be something that a historical scholar type of person is going to be most interested in or are there other people that are likely to enjoy reading this?
Lucy: Well judging from some of the reactions I’ve had in England and also here because I found that at Notre Dame, several people had already read the novel, I would say quite a wide range of people. It would interest Catholics because of the very difficult situation in which Catholics found themselves in Germany when Hitler was coming to power. I think it would interest anyone with an interest in the 20th century history of Europe which is such a terrible story and affects so many things that *** [00:08:57] around in the globe today and I think people who just like a good story, I hope it freshens so that it’s say, approachable and readable and you get very involved in the life of this young man and his friends and you mind very much what happens to them so that by the end of the book, what is going to be wasted cruelly now shows you a generation has engaged in a lot of the *** [00:09:25]. I think that people have enjoyed the book because they get involved in it and the *** [00:09:30] is quite firm. There’s nothing wrong with their history. I did a great deal of work. So I know that it could have happened, all of this.
Chris: Now why is the book set so far to the east?
Lucy: Ah, well the book is set so far in the east because at least in England and I suspect in the US as well, we all think of Germany in terms of the western front in the First World War, the trenches and then we might think of the Rhine and the great cities of the Rhine that were bombed in the Second World War and we know what happened to West Germany after the war. People have very much left the *** [00:10:10] with the history of the east. For example, we all know that Germany lost the First World War but the Germans of the east did not lose the First World War, they thoroughly defeated the Russians and regarded themselves as victors in the First World War so the sense of injustice about the Treaty of Versailles and what happened after the war was much keener in the east and there was a great deal of support for Hitler in the east for that reason and we’re just not familiar with the story of *** [00:10:46] for example, which is in central, central Europe. It’s not an eastern European city; it’s a central European city. It’s not very far from Prague; it’s not very far from Vienna. A thoroughly German city which has now disappeared into Poland and is now a great Polish city. There’s been a splendid revival there. It was a wonderful city of Pope John Paul to the city of *** [00:11:13] which is now called and there’s been a great deal of reconciliation between Poles and Germans actually in the city. There’s a wonderful, venerable old professor at Columbia here in New York called Fritz Stern who was born and educated in Breslau just the same time as my book is set and I’ve corresponded with him and he and his parent’s graduation, they left Germany just in time in 1937 or ’38 and they headed to America and he has been a professor at Columbia for 30 to 40 years and his life is the kind of life still much affected by all these events. He went back to the University of
Breslau in Poland and was given an honorary degree by the university where his parents as Germans had got their degrees long years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century. That kind of story, as in actually resonates with a lot of Americans. People have such mixed backgrounds and such mixed pasts and I think it would interest a lot of people in that kind of way.
Chris: Well, was there anything else you wanted to share with our listeners about the book in particular?
Lucy: Well, I think the whole question of being a Catholic convert is a question that still interests quite a lot of people. It’s a great religion now almost anywhere in the west to become a Catholic than it was then in Germany when it was quite difficult for various reasons. I think the Catholic aspect of the book, there are a lot of ideas discussed in the book, I hope not in a *** [00:13:01] way. I hope it’s all quite reasonable and understandable but this was the period immediately after the Russian Revolution and idealistic young people with some of them swept away by what they thought to be the great new future of socialism and other people were deciding that all religion was part of the past and something to do with the childhood of the human race that we do outgrow but as other people so that Christianity was the only hope for the future which wasn’t going to be entirely barbarous in Europe. So I think there are plenty of things to interest contradictory types of people in this book and I’m a Catholic writer. I’ve written…I wrote three or four years ago a *** [00:13:49] book which was also published by the Ignatius Press called In the Light of Christ, Writings in the Western Tradition which is a great big survey of texts from Plato to Czelslaw Milosz who is a Polish poet who died a couple of years ago and that has encompassed why it’s establishing, there are so many things we can’t understand and we can’t read properly unless we have a Christian context for what we’re doing. So I’m that kind of writer anyway. But this is a story. This is not a heady academic book; it’s a story.
Chris: And what did you find to be the most difficult part of writing the book?
Lucy: I suppose I find the most difficult part of writing the book to be just the work I have to do to find out as much about the period and this part of the world which has not been written about nearly as much as western Germany. There are scholarly books, I wrote a great many books. I really enjoyed doing the research for the book. Once I’ve done it all, I actually found writing the book not all that difficult. The characters just seemed to appear and demand to be written about. I think a lot of novelists find this. They set off on a story and they find the characters decide what’s going to happen next. And I very much enjoy writing the book. In my second novel, I wrote another historical novel quite different about a *resonation* in England and that was a lot of research as well but I also very much enjoyed writing that. But what you have to do is concentrate all the time. You have to imagine what it was like to be a bunch of bright interesting 20-year-olds and then older, swept along in the tide of what was a particularly difficult and tormented period of history. That was what I was trying to do, imagining what it was like.
Chris: Well thank you, Lucy. It has been a pleasure to have you on the show and I hope that everyone will find a time to check out A Postcard from the Volcano.
Lucy: Thank you very much for having me.
Chris: You’re very welcome. You already have a great day and God bless.
Lucy: Thank you. I’m most grateful. Good bye.
———————————
Transcript of Interview with Lucy Becket about A Postcard from the Volcano. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
A Postcard from the Volcano at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1006119/Postcard-from-Volcano-Novel-Pre-War-Germany