Afflicted with Otherness

Stones from the River
by Ursula Hegi
Poseidon Press, 1994
507 pages. $23 hard cover

Trudi Montag, in the eyes of the Gestapo officer who interrogates her, is "afflicted with otherness." She is a dwarf, a Zwerg , no taller than a child, though 27. In the Third Reich, otherness is a crime. Before the Nazis, in small, traditional towns like Trudi's home village of Burgdorf with its "Ordnungsliebe - its love of order," otherness was merely shameful. To be a Zwerg , Trudi tells the officer as she plays for her life, is to carry "your deepest secret inside out - there for everyone to see." Unlike Eva Rosen Sturm, whose deepest secret both she and Trudi had thought was the red birthmark covering her chest like petals, Trudi needed no sewn yellow star to mark her for ostracism. After a childhood of hanging from doorjambs to stretch her stunted body, of unanswered prayers to be ordinary, Trudi has accepted the power that comes from playing the Zwerg . She has learned how to exploit the pity, disgust, or dismissal her appearance engenders in order to penetrate others' secrets and shape them into stories that can curse or bless. She knows the Gestapo officer's deep secret - that he cares about and believes in nothing, not even the Fźhrer - as she knows most of the secrets of Burgdorf. That knowledge helps her survive the Gestapo and the rage she carries inside herself.

Ursula Hegi's third novel, Stones from the River , is the compelling story of Trudi Montag, and through the probing of that town gossip, the story of German village life, especially women's lives, from 1915 to 1952, from one war through another. Hegi describes in rich detail the importance of every life in this riverside village and how each life affects all the others. An associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, Hegi was born and raised in Germany. She has written all of her books in English, though, with a wide-ranging style that always fits her dramatic purposes.

Stones from the River charts how the power of women in Burgdorf rises when their men are at war and how it falls on the soldiers' return. Yet always it is the old widows who secretly control Burgdorf's identity. They advise their children; they teach the canon of fairy tales to their grandchildren; they initiate the grieving into widowhood. But their Catholic traditionalism and love of family become weaknesses under the Nazi regime.

When Hitler demands "belief without doubts," it is only the skeptical or the bitter, like Trudi, who resist. When the family is declared "the most essential unit of the nation," when kinderreiche - child rich - mothers are honored each year on the birthday of Hitler's mother with pins proclaiming their four or six or eight offspring, when Kindergeld - child money - is paid beginning with the third child, only the isolated or unmarried are not taken in. Trudi spitefully calls the girls' organization parallel to the boys' Hitler Youth, the "Alliance of German Milk Cows."

It is Trudi's mouth that attracts the Gestapo's attention; it is her skillful gossiping that makes her an asset to the resistance. Being an outcast, Trudi is well prepared to help the new outcasts the Nazis create, her Jewish friend Eva among them, and they ultimately teach her what it is to truly belong. When the postwar Burgdorf pretends to innocence through silence, Trudi, the teller of secrets, speaks out loud. Trudi declares that "no one could escape the responsibility of having lived in this time." Through Trudi, Hegi acknowledges that "I am burdened by being German. We all are."

In writing about a dwarf struggling within the Third Reich, Hegi has ambitiously placed her book next to Gźnter Grass's 1959 bleak, surreal, comic masterpiece, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) . Hegi has produced a positive that makes a revealing contrast with Grass's brilliant negative. Trudi Montag tortures herself to grow; Oskar Matzerath, Grass's hero, throws himself down stairs at the age of three to announce his refusal to grow anymore in protest against his parents' expectations. Trudi perfects conversation; Oskar perfects drumming on a toy drum. Trudi uses secrets to gain power; Oskar perfects a scream that can cut, engrave, or shatter glass. Trudi's mother dies at a young age in a mental hospital in Dźsseldorf; Oskar, at 30, drums his memories into Grass's novel from a ward in a Dźsseldorf mental hospital. In Hegi's terms, both Oskar and Trudi's mother have gone past "the edge of craziness" into a "haven where they belonged or felt peace," an edge that Trudi discovers within herself and rejects. In like manner, Hegi's novel is more sane and accessible than Grass's; it offers the reader more empathetic space, more opportunity for personal insights. Yet it cannot rival the inventiveness or the fireworks packed with The Tin Drum .

The initial chapters of this book feel forced. Stones from the River doesn't exhibit the lyrical perfection of Hegi's second novel, Floating in My Mother's Palm (Poseidon Press, 1990), which painted luminous portraits of the people of Burgdorf after World War II. That's because Hegi tries on a new form with each new novel she writes. No trilogies for her. Stones from the River has the breadth and the sensuality of an excellent landscape painting, and after its accomplishments, Hegi is poised to write her masterpiece.

Kent Chadwick's Northwest Books is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in Union, WA.

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Contents on this page were published in the December/January 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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