Revealing New Perspective in Historical Fiction
Author J.C. Maetis discusses how his own family history helped reveal a new perspective in historical fiction with his new novel, The Vienna Writers Circle.
To say that it started with The Tattooist of Auschwitz would be incorrect, because I had been considering writing a Jewish-holocaust saga for some while—going all the way back to Schindler’s Ark/List some 30 years ago—but that was the final tipping point.
Part of this stems from my father’s own Jewish family background, which I was not aware of until he was on his deathbed. I was only 14, and I and my two sisters had been raised in my mother's Irish-Catholic religion, so I had little grasp of what it actually meant to be Jewish at the time.
Though I did learn in the years following my father's death, with the first two key questions to my mother: Why were we raised Catholic rather than Jewish? And why did my father bury his Jewish roots?
The answer to the first question was simple but poignant: My eldest sister was born in 1943, and that year you could toss a coin on whether Hitler won the war. And if he did win, Britain would not be safe for Jews, as had already happened through much of Nazi-occupied Europe. Following on from that partly answered the second question, but the rest was more complex.
My father saw himself very much as British. He'd arrived on British shores when he was only six years old, Britain had provided a safe haven to his family from Lithuania and many other Jewish refugees, and Winston Churchill was his hero. Indeed, my father's contributions to the war effort and beyond were notable in their own way. Having studied at Cambridge, my father went on to become one of the country's leading statisticians, providing vital weather statistics for RAF bombing raids over Germany, then later the statistics for the Whittle project on jet propulsion.
Yet despite all these marvellous contributions, my father was unable to join his local tennis or golf club because he was Jewish. Fellow Cambridge classmate, Jacob Bronowski, was similarly told to forget becoming a University Dean for the same reason.
This cloud of racism and my father burying his roots in order to protect his family struck a strong chord with me, and later in researching I discovered this was quite widespread, with a number of networks established to help mask identities and provide fresh papers. This was an element not really covered in Tattooist of Auschwitz, it seemed almost automatic that being Jewish the main characters would end up in a death camp—yet I knew that the struggles to mask or bury identities to avoid the camps was a major factor. The issue of mixed marriages and backgrounds partly or wholly buried therefore features strongly in The Vienna Writers Circle.
Indeed, I was surprised that so few current holocaust-related novels dealt with these vital elements. Which is why I felt it was important to show both sides.
The final element that made this more personal to me was that of writing. I had little knowledge of my father's extended family in Lithuania, many of whom had perished in the holocaust. But I thought to myself: “How would I feel if one day I was told I could no longer write, then the next my family were under threat?” This then added a more personal note that I could relate to.
My choice of Vienna, Austria, was not only because of the prominent circles of writers and intellectuals there—the most notable of which had been formed by Sigmund Freud—but because Nazi edicts came into effect there over a period of only a few months. Which makes the hard decisions the main characters must make more immediate.
As part of this, the difficulties of Jews and others in the Nazi spotlight being able to leave comes into sharper focus. A case in point is, in fact, Sigmund Freud. While able to get himself, his wife, and his daughter out of Vienna to safety, four of his sisters perished in death camps. This shows that even in the case of Freud, such a prominent figure, with many letters of support for his freedom—from notables such as H.G. Wells, Salvador Dali, and various other prominent figures—that influence only went so far. This underlines that for lesser-known writers and figures, as is the case with our two main protagonists—Mathias Kraemer and Johannes Namal—the chances of escape were slim.
And while Jews were the primary focus of the Nazis, other groups were also under threat: gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents, and Communists, which I felt had been given scant attention in other holocaust-related books. There were even a number of Austrian and German anti-Nazi sympathizers, though this was an area particularly fraught with danger, as Jews and others under threat wouldn’t know who they could trust and the punishment for those aiding was equally harsh.
These added elements play an important part in The Vienna Writers Circle, particularly with the formation of identity-change and escape networks, which formed a central part of my research, along with the writers’ groups and literary agents of that period, Freud, Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938), and Sobibór death camp—all of which are based strongly on historical fact. But in essence, The Vienna Writers Circle—slow-brewed over decades of family history, then a final intense period of research—is a tribute not only to my father and his extended family who perished in the holocaust, but to the Jewish writers of Vienna and beyond of 1938-1945.
J.C. Maetis is better known as British thriller writer John Matthews whose books have sold over 1.6 million copies and been translated in 14 languages. Maetis is his father’s original Jewish family name, which he felt was more fitting for this novel. His father's family left Lithuania for London in 1919 in the wake of Jewish pogroms there, but many of his extended family perished when Hitler invaded Lithuania in 1941. Maetis lives in Surrey, U.K.
