Carolyn Kirby reviews The Mare by Angharad Hampshire, an “astonishingly good” debut novel which tells the true story of the first woman to be extradited from the United States for Nazi war crimes.
What would you do if you discovered someone you loved had taken part in genocide? This question faces Russell Ryan, a mild-mannered engineer, when a reporter from the New York Times knocks on his door and tells him that his wife was a guard at the Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps.
The true story of Russell Ryan and his wife Hermine Braunsteiner is told through fiction for the first time in Angharad Hampshire’s astonishingly good debut novel, The Mare. The title is taken from Hermine’s nickname amongst camp inmates when she was a camp guard, or Aufseherin, because she had a habit of kicking them half to death. Initially, Russell refuses to believe the accusations against Hermine, his kind, hard-working wife who he says, “wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
But as the story develops and Hermine comes closer to being extradited from the US for war crimes, Russell begins to understand her role as a small but vicious cog in Hitler’s genocidal machine. Cleverly told in short chapters that alternate between Hermine’s first-person account of her life and Russell’s thoughts addressed to his wife, the novel brings us as close as we are likely to get to understanding how the evil of Nazism infected a population.
The Mare is unusual, perhaps unique, in taking us inside the head of a perpetrator of Nazi atrocity who is also a woman. Angharad Hampshire doesn’t shy away from making Hermine an entirely human, even relatable figure. Indeed, Hermine is characterised by her ordinariness.
Poorly educated but from a loving family, her aim is to help her mother through the tough times of war. When Hermine learns that prison guards earn double the wage of factory workers, she moves happily to work in the new women’s camp at Ravensbrück.
Before entering the concentration camp, Hermine has hardly ever seen violence, let alone committed it herself. Yet such is the brutalising system of the camp, that Hermine quickly moves from being shocked and frightened by the guards’ attacks on the female prisoners to, within a week, whipping and kicking the women herself.
The Mare’s portrayal of Hermine’s descent into barbarity reveals the terrifying ease with which the ‘banality of evil,’ in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, can enfold anyone. The female guards not only become habituated to savagery, they take out the frustrations of their own miserable lives on the camp inmates.
In one unforgettable scene, Hermine attacks “with real venom” a newly arrived prisoner with beautiful hair who has caught the eye of her SS officer boyfriend. Despite these outbursts, Hermine is a not a sadist, yet nor is she a victim. She is just doing the same as everyone around her by fitting in with a ruthless, all-powerful system as best she can even if that means carrying out acts of unspeakable cruelty as part of her daily routine.
Looking back, Hermine knows she did wrong but sees no alternative. “Nobody can ever understand what it was like unless you were there. It was hell on earth. I did not enjoy it. I did what I had to until I could leave.”
Russell Ryan wrestles with the morality of continuing to love his wife as the truth about her past unfolds. During the 1970s and 80s finds himself peeling back the veil over wartime Germany and finding horrors in every quaint village and cosy kitchen. Russell says, “I see what this nation refuses to, that everyone was involved in one way or another, however big or small.”
When Russell meets a genial retired railwayman from Düsseldorf, the man admits to having seen Jews transported through the station on their way to the camps, but he and everyone else had looked the other way. He tells Russell, “It seems unforgivable now, but it felt very different back then.”
Everything in The Mare leads us to the same conclusion as Russell, that the true horror of Nazi crimes lies not in our similarity to their victims but in our similarity to their perpetrators. It’s a shocking insight that he can’t get his uncomprehending American friends to accept. Infuriated and frustrated by their inability to have any empathy with Hermine, he tells them, “If we’d been there in her place, we’d have done the same thing.”
The Mare is a brilliant exploration of the mass psychology of genocide, but its insights have additional emotional punch because it’s also the portrait of a marriage. The reason Russell is so intent on delving into Hermine’s motivation and exposing the roots of the violence she inflicted is because he loves her. And, like Russell, in coming to understand, if not forgive, one woman, we come to understand a nation.
The Mare is an incredibly gripping and thought-provoking read. The book is written with such style and confidence it’s hard to believe it’s a debut, but the novel is built on many years of holocaust research and academic study. I’ve read a great many novels about the Second World War and I have no hesitation in recommending The Mare as one of the very best.
The Mare by Angharad Hampshire was published on 19 September, 2024.
Angharad Hampshire has worked as a radio producer for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, honorary lecturer in journalism at the University of Hong Kong, and regular contributor to the South China Morning Post. She is currently a research fellow at York St John University and teaches on the Creative Writing MA. The Mare is her first novel.
Carolyn Kirby is a novelist and HWA member. Her debut novel, The Conviction of Cora Burns was longlisted for the HWA debut Crown Awards. Her follow-up novel, When We Fall, is a thriller and dark love story set between Britain and Poland during the Second World War. Her third, Ravenglass, will be published in autumn 2025.
You may enjoy some more of Carolyn’s contributions to Historia:
Her review of A Prince and a Spy by Rory Clements
Interviews with AD Bergin and Clare Mulley
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre
‘Paedo Hunter Turns Prey!’ The ironic fate of the father of tabloid journalism
Other features on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust include:
Living in the minds of monsters by Douglas Jackson
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme and Concentration camps and the politics of memory by Catherine Hokin
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Elisabeth Gifford
Torn from home by Jason Hewitt
Auschwitz: the Biggest Black Market in Europe by Chris Petit
Unseen Auschwitz by William Ryan
The Paradise Ghetto by Fergus O’Connell
Images:
- Crop of the cover of The Mare
- Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan when a camp guard: supplied by Angharad Hampshire
- Women prisoners put to work at Ravensbrück, 1939–43: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1985-0417-15 (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
- Himmler visiting Ravensbrück in January, 1941: supplied by Angharad Hampshire
