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WORK TITLE: My Own Dear Brother
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE: http://hollymuller.com/
CITY: Cardiff, Wales
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Welsh
Austrian-Welsh * http://hollymuller.com/about/ * https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/holly-muller
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1981, in Brecon, Wales.
EDUCATION:University of South Wales, earned first class degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, musician. Singer, lyricist, and violinist for Hail! The Planes band, Cardiff, Wales.
AWARDS:Michael Parnell Prize, University of South Wales.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to Rarebit: New Welsh Fiction, Parthian Books, 2014, and New Welsh Short Stories, Seren Books, 2015. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the London Independent and Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
Author Holly Müller was born in Wales in 1981 to a Welsh mother and an Austrian father. Müller put that paternal heritage to good use in her debut novel, My Own Dear Brother, set in an Austrian village toward the end of World War II. Müller, a short-story writer as well as a musician, has additionally worked with adults with learning disabilities and disabled university students. As she discovered when visiting her Austrian side of the family, she also has a great-uncle with learning disabilities and autistic traits. These were part of the inspiration for Müller’s first novel, which involves the fate of one such learning-disabled character, Schosi, in the Nazi era. In the online Female First, Müller observed: “Writing My Own Dear Brother brought me face-to-face with the horrifying reality of 1940s wartime Austria, when the Nazis murdered thousands of disabled people, labeled as ‘life unworthy of life’. … Seen as ‘useless mouths’—a drain on resources in a time of economic crisis—those with disabilities were sent to designated clinics and killed.” Happily, Müller’s great uncle had been spared such a fate.
At the Wales Art Review Website, Müller remarked to Durre S. Mughal on a second line of inspiration for My Own Dear Brother: “It is obviously inspired by my family background. I wanted to write something about Austria, … because I don’t really know Austria that well and I don’t speak fluent German, that sort of thing. I couldn’t speak to my family fluently and the culture was quite different. My dad didn’t really bring any of that in to my family, so I was just really curious and fascinated about my own history and about this place where he was from. I wanted to know more about my dad I think and his upbringing and his identity.” Müller worked more than six years on this first novel, researching in Austria, interviewing aged survivors of the war and of the Nazi regime to be able to immerse herself in the time and place. In a Writers & Artists Website post, Müller noted of this research: “If I’d known then just how sensitive and highly charged is the subject of Austria’s Nazism, I don’t know if I’d have dared begin. But I met with almost no hostility. A retired judge in his sixties said it was wonderful to meet someone so curious. … I wondered if I could do it all justice. … I tried to write, knowing this book was too important to abandon. I’d learned things few people knew, uncovered compelling stories, explored the moral ambiguity of my own background and another time.”
Müller’s My Own Dear Brother is part historical narrative, part coming-of-age novel. Set in 1944 in the Austrian village of Felddorf, the book features thirteen-year-old Ursula Hildesheim and her family: her fourteen-year-old brother, Anton; Dorli, her sixteen-year-old sister; and her mother, Marli. The father is killed on the Russian front, and Ursula witnesses the turmoil that this loss causes. Her mother begins an affair with a married man, and her adored older brother, Anton, suddenly displays a degree of cruelty that she never before imagined him capable of. A member of the Hitler Youth, he willingly kills an escaped POW. When his mother becomes pregnant, he takes revenge on her and her lover. Meanwhile, Ursula has befriended the mentally challenged youth Schosi, and Anton’s wrath even extends to him, informing the Nazis on the child, who is subsequently taken to an institution where he will be euthanized. This forces Ursula to go on a mission to try to save her young friend. The novel continues through the end of the war, and Ursula, now fifteen, must also endure the Soviet occupation forces.
A Reviewer’s Bookwatch contributor had high praise for My Own Dear Brother, calling it a “compelling coming-of-age story and an unflinching study of both cruelty and courage.” Library Journal reviewer Lyndsie Robinson also had a high assessment of the novel, noting: “Muller’s writing is lyrical and haunting, and she allows readers to delve deeply into the universal themes of loyalty, morality, and courage in the face of extreme adversity.” A Publishers Weekly writer termed this an “intense, moving novel,” while a Kirkus Reviews Online critic felt that “this tough, unflinching novel illuminates the cost of war on those most closely affected.”
A London Guardian Online contributor was also impressed with My Own Dear Brother, calling it “captivating and haunting from the first page until the last.” Washington Independent Review of Books Website writer Mariko Hewer added further praise, observing: “Notwithstanding a difficult anticlimax, the novel’s ending satisfies. Ursula still feels uncertain about her future, but she feels an undercurrent of hope that did not exist before, perhaps because, during the war, she did not have much to wish for beyond survival. In the end, My Own Dear Brother is a touching chronicle of some of the lesser-known casualties of war and of the resilience of human spirit despite those difficulties.” Sydney Morning Herald Online reviewer Andrew Riemer had a similarly high assessment, writing: “Ursula never loses her love or concern for her brother, despite her clear-eyed understanding of his misdeeds and cruelty, and her misgivings about his enthusiasm for the Nazis. This endows My Own Dear Brother with a moral ambiguity that Muller handles with verve and integrity.”
Likewise, Durre Shahwar, writing in the online Wales Arts Review, commented: “While war frames the novel, the themes of love, loyalty, and courage dominate it. It is not so much about the war as it is about coming of age in such a time. There are glimmers of hope, despite the psychological trauma and heartbreak. … Yet, despite being ‘historical fiction’, My Own Dear Brother offers a refreshingly new perspective and has an immediacy of the present to it.” Australian Online critic Katherine Gillespie concluded: “Muller’s first novel … is … ambitious in scope. For the most part, its careful and measured plot is quietly captivating. The experience of reading a story such as this … could have been an endurance test, with innumerable pitfalls and punctuated by a world of horrors. In fact, Muller creates a flawed and vulnerable young heroine we believe in as she copes as best she can with brutal circumstance after brutal circumstance. This is a coming-of-age novel set during the worst of times and it compels belief.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, September 1, 2016, Lyndsie Robinson, review of My Own Dear Brother, p. 100.
Publishers Weekly, August 29, 2016, review of My Own Dear Brother, p. 61.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, November, 2016, Andrea Kay, review of My Own Dear Brother.
ONLINE
Australian Online, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ (April 16, 2016), Katherine Gillespie, review of My Own Dear Brother.
Curtis Brown, https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/ (April 24, 2017), “Holly Muller.”
Female First, http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ (February 16, 2016), Holly Müller, “My Experience of Writing about a Disabled Character.”
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 11, 2016), review of My Own Dear Brother.
Historical Novel Society, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (November, 2016), Ellen Keith, review of My Own Dear Brother.
Holly Müller Website, http://hollymuller.com (May 11, 2017).
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (July 20, 2016), review of My Own Dear Brother.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com.au/ (May 14, 2016), Andrew Riemer, review of My Own Dear Brother.
Wales Arts Review, http://www.walesartsreview.org/ (May 7, 2016), Durre S. Mughal, author interview; (October 4, 2016), Durre Shahwar, review of My Own Dear Brother.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (October 31, 2016), Mariko Hewer, review of My Own Dear Brother.
Writers & Artists, https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/ (June 1, 2017), Holly Müller, “Shadows on the Wall.”
Holly Muller
Novelist
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BIOGRAPHY
ICM Partners
Holly Müller is a novelist and short story writer born in 1981 in Brecon, Wales to a Welsh mother and Austrian father. Her short story, My Cousin’s Gun, was published by Parthian Books in their anthology of new Welsh fiction entitled Rarebit. Rarebit was chosen as Waterstones Book of the Month for January 2014.
Her historical novel My Own Dear Brother is the product of several years of writing and research including the gathering of testimonies during a research trip to Austria.
She achieved a first class degree in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of South Wales and was awarded the Michael Parnell prize for submission of outstanding creative work. She is currently enrolled on the MPhil in Writing at the University of South Wales and will be transferring to the Creative Writing PhD in the near future.
Holly is also the singer, violinist and lyricist in a Cardiff-based band called Hail! The Planes and was involved in writing and recording an EP entitled "Send A Signal To Me, Love", released in November 2013. The band has appeared at various British music festivals, supported major acts and has received airplay on BBC Radio stations.
ABOUT
ABOUT HOLLY MÜLLER
Holly Müller is a novelist, short story writer, and musician. She is half Austrian and half Welsh and lives in Cardiff. Her debut novel, My Own Dear Brother, a historical fiction set in post-war Austria, is published worldwide with Bloomsbury.
The short story ‘My Cousin’s Gun’ was published by Parthian Books in their anthology of new Welsh fiction Rarebit (Waterstones book of the month for January 2014). Another of her stories, ‘The Bare-chested Adventurer’, was published in Seren Books’ 2015 anthology New Welsh Short Stories.
She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of South Wales where she also tutored creative writing for several years. She has written for The Independent and The Guardian and has performed her work at various literary events including Hay Literature Festival 2014, and Cheltenham Literature Festival 2015.
Holly is the singer, lyricist and violinist in the band Hail! The Planes who have appeared at various UK music festivals, supported major acts, and received airplay on BBC Radio stations.
QUOTE:
Writing My Own Dear Brother brought me face-to-face with the horrifying reality of 1940s wartime Austria, when the Nazis murdered thousands of disabled people, labeled as 'life unworthy of life'. ... Seen as 'useless mouths' -- a drain on resources in a time of economic crisis -- those with disabilities were sent to designated clinics and killed
My experience of writing about a disabled character by Holly Muller
10 February 2016
Writing My Own Dear Brother brought me face-to-face with the horrifying reality of 1940s wartime Austria, when the Nazis murdered thousands of disabled people, labeled as 'life unworthy of life'. One of my main characters, Schosi, is a teenage boy with a learning disability, closely based on my great uncle who lives in the Austrian countryside. My great uncle has a learning disability and autistic traits. He spends obsessive hours petting or feeding his mangy ginger cats, murmuring to them in his soft monotone, or tinkering with his wristwatch. I share his love of cats and once helped him conceal a litter of kittens born in his shed, saving them from his brother who would soon come to smash their heads with a stone (from his point of view, there were enough mousers already). In a nearby barn, we gently deposited the kittens inside the torn upholstery of an old car, then coaxed the mother cat to the nest.
Holly Muller
Holly Muller
My affection for my relative has certainly been written into the character of Schosi. I've also drawn upon my work with disabled adults. I now provide support to disabled university students but used to work with adults with learning disabilities in their own homes. Involved in all aspects of their everyday lives, I got to know each person well. Relationships strengthened over time; trust was built and mutual respect. I worked to help all to meet their full potential.
So, when I researched the brutally pragmatic murder of disabled people in the Third Reich it hit me very hard. Seen as 'useless mouths' - a drain on resources in a time of economic crisis - those with disabilities were sent to designated clinics and killed. Children like Schosi disappeared. I read many testimonies about the shocking experiences of such children. I admit that I struggled to continue at times; it was so harrowing. But I felt there was an important story to be told and Schosi was wonderful and I wanted to write about his life, his world, his thoughts and feelings, to show him as more than a voiceless victim.
My great uncle, in his late seventies now, was a child just like Schosi, growing up in 1940s Austria. Somehow he survived - it could easily have been otherwise. When I visit him, I can't think of it, this awful outcome that might have been. He's no angel, no more than anyone else. On one occasion, he stole my parents' car keys because he wanted us all to stay a little longer. His face lit with mischief, he announced he'd hidden them amongst the myriad boxes in the cobwebbed garage. It took an age to locate them, so he got his wish. But he's undeniably a good man. His peaceful kindness is infectious. I love his lined and inquisitive face, his frank, un-judging eyes. He accepts me and my stilted German, my foreign clothes. He doesn't reject me for my difference or assess my value by what I can give. We're just two people - that is all. Two people who really like cats.
Read more: http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/books/holly-muller-mown-dear-brother-916419.html#ixzz4gnlytL00
QUOTE:
"[I]t is obviously inspired by my family background. I wanted to write something about Austria, and it sounds really clichéd but I was compelled to write something about it, because I don’t really know Austria that well and I don’t speak fluent German, that sort of thing. I couldn’t speak to my family fluently and the culture was quite different. My dad didn’t really bring any of that in to my family, so I was just really curious and fascinated about my own history and about this place where he was from. I wanted to know more about my dad I think and his upbringing and his identity
IN CONVERSATION WITH HOLLY MÜLLER
Holly Müller is a novelist, short story writer, and musician. She is half Austrian and half Welsh and lives in Cardiff. Her debut novel, My Own Dear Brother, a historical fiction set in post-war Austria, was published in February this year by Bloomsbury. She was also published in the Parthian Books’ anthology of new Welsh fiction Rarebit and the Seren Books’ 2015 anthology New Welsh Short Stories. She has written for The Independent, The Guardian, and performed her work at various literary events including Hay Literature Festival 2014, and Cheltenham Literature Festival 2015. Holly is also the singer, lyricist and violinist in the band Hail! The Planes who have appeared at various UK music festivals.
After reviewing My Own Dear Brother earlier this month, I interviewed Müller in a very busy and loud café in Cardiff. This is a shortened and edited version of the 2-hour long interview in which Holly and I got carried away talking about the research and the writing of My Own Dear Brother, feminism, writer’s block, creative writing courses, and the processes of being published.
Durre S. Mughal: Where did you get the idea from, for the novel?
Holly Müller: Well, I suppose there’s two answers to it, which is that, one, it is obviously inspired by my family background. I wanted to write something about Austria, and it sounds really clichéd but I was compelled to write something about it, because I don’t really know Austria that well and I don’t speak fluent German, that sort of thing. I couldn’t speak to my family fluently and the culture was quite different. My dad didn’t really bring any of that in to my family, so I was just really curious and fascinated about my own history and about this place where he was from. I wanted to know more about my dad I think and his upbringing and his identity.
The actual idea for the book started off as a short story called the Krampus, which was also the working title of the novel and it was centred around this Krampus tradition. It just felt like there was a lot that could be expanded on. I was doing a postgrad at the time, and the people on the creative writing workshop at the time got me thinking about how this should be a novel. I was originally a short story writer and a poet so I hadn’t actually thought about it, but then I seriously considered it and started to develop it.
9781408866771I wouldn’t take you for a short story writer, maybe because I haven’t read any of them yet, but reading the novel, it feels like that is your natural form.
I think maybe it actually is. You’re probably right, it’s just I didn’t realize it. I’ve written short stories and I really enjoyed that, and I’m proud of some of the short stories I’ve written but it doesn’t feel quite right. I think I’m a maximalist instead of a minimalist, like I have a lot of words. Instead of condensing my prose sometimes it’s easier to let it go.
So did you have an interest in historical fiction, aside from your personal history?
Not a particular interest – I’ve read some but I didn’t think I wanted to be a historical fiction writer. It’s just that I wanted to write that book. I don’t think I want to write more historical fiction even now, it just happened.
Did you always want to be a writer?
I think I was always keen about the idea of writing since A-Level. My English teacher in high school encouraged me to send my extracts off to university when applying. He got me to send a piece to UEA, which as you know is the pinnacle of CW. And I did and they offered me an interview and then a place. And I think they only have 10 places a year, and that hit home to me that I must really have something. But I didn’t take the place because I was too scared.
Oh no way?!
They were really like, you have to breathe, live, drink, eat writing every minute of the day and they were so intense about it. I was 18 and I was just like, ‘I just want to get drunk a bit! So I think I’ll go a bit more lukewarm on this.’ So I sort of missed that boat but I’m quite glad.
Ah well, you’re fine now, it’s all worked out… Did you have the plot in mind before you started to write the novel?
Certain elements were in my mind quite clearly. Like the place and the kind of atmosphere, the idea of krampus, something about Ursula and the strong emotion she was having about this affair that was happening in the family. But really no, I didn’t have the plot. It was the characters, I suppose. I had Anton and Schosi there also quite clearly in my mind, and then I just kind of wrote myself into the novel and into the plot, which is why I think it took me so long to write.
Apparently it took you six years?
Six years to finish, which is a lot to do with me just drifting in. It was exciting but stressful to not know where I was going next. There were a lot of exciting moments of discovery where you feel like your mind has done something great without you controlling it, but it was a huge learning process. I’d read enough novels but I never knew what components a novel needed to be a successful from a writer’s point of view and I had to work it out as I went.
In my opinion, the novel is too dark to be considered a children’s novel, but there are themes of children and coming of age in the novel. Was that your intention?
Not consciously, but I realized that that would be what it was about. If you are 13 at the start of the novel and 15 by the end of it and in the meantime all that has happened to you during the novel that happens to Ursula… that is essentially is what is about. About someone losing their innocence but also gaining the strength to cope with the adult world. And gaining the strength to know her own mind and defend herself against threats, including her own brother.
Did you have in mind the kinder transport children then or not?
Yeah that was an interesting point in the review, but no, not really, I was very much immersing myself in the Austrian point of view, an Austrian child during that time and their experience, the novel infact doesn’t even deal with the holocaust, it doesn’t deal with the extermination of the Jews, it mentions it in passing really.
Did you consciously intend that?
I definitely grappled with that consciously when I was writing the book. How am I going to deal with all the issues that surround this very sensitive part of history and deal with it in a way that I could justify myself if the book was published? I thought, can you write a novel about that period of history and focus on something else? So it focuses on the treatment of disabled people under the Nazi regime, the treatment of women and girls at the hands of Russians occupying forces, the nature of complicity and culpability of the average citizen… themes I felt were less explored of that time. And I guess I felt that the holocaust wasn’t my story to tell. You know when you’re reading the book that that’s going on in tandem with that.
Yeah, that’s the first thing that people think when WW2 is mentioned.
Yeah so I assumed prior knowledge that they know the context and they know that the holocaust is happening alongside all of this stuff as well. One of my relatives was disabled and was very lucky to survive the SWW so I felt more confident depicting this as I had more connection to it.
So are any of the characters based on real people then? I assume Schosi is…
Schosi is the one that is actually based on a real family member of mine, my great uncle has similar learning disabilities and autistic traits, and is not mid 70s. He’s very gentle and calm and kind, loves animals, mischievous and lovely. It just hit me very hard that he was lucky to survive, because his own brothers supported the Nazi regime, which would advocate his own death. And the more I researched it, the more I realized it. I was trying to avoid telling the real story, the very grim story of the real Schosi, but I realized that there was an opportunity to tell that story and I needed to take it instead of avoid it.
Yeah it is quite obvious that this was written from quite a touching, personal place. So would you say that Schosi is your favourite character then?
Schosi, hands down. But close behind is Ursula.
Ursula is quite mature for her age, as a 13-year old. Even compared to some of the other girls in the novel, even her own sister, Dorli. Ursula is quite brave. What made you write such a strong female protagonist?
I wanted her to be flawed but I think she’s had quite a difficult time. She’s quite a serious little thing. There’s a lot of anxiety around to do with her family and position in village, or friendships, or lack of friendships. I suppose in some ways it feels like her family members are more capricious and less reliable than she is in some ways. More selfish and difficult, and she’s had to be an adult to cope with all the volatility in her family. I wanted to show how resourceful and strong a young person can be. There’s quite a lot of myself in her which I think is expected in a first novel, and because I was in a similar scenario but in a different way.
I should say though that I am really very much proudly a feminist. And I didn’t think that, ‘I’m going to write a story of women and make them strong’, but I also very instinctively and very passionately believe in writing female characters that don’t shy away from the reality. Women can be just as strong and complicated, and just as flawed and just as dark. I don’t want to read about diluted female characters that aren’t ambitious or erotic or cruel or the things that we all can be at times. She’s very young but I wanted to show that she’s sly and she’s got all these flaws and that’s what it is to be female just as much it is to be male and I just wanted to write someone with a lot of substance I suppose. Though she can be a bit of a wimp as well!
I love that. I couldn’t agree with you more! How was it to write some of the more difficult parts of the novel? Such as the scenes from Hartburg hospital and when the red army take over the village?
It was difficult. I would find it quite hard to sit down to write a lot of days. Because I knew how deeply I would have to go into what I was writing about and how I would have to engage my emotions as well as my brain. That I’d have to confront some of this material and the reality of it if I wanted to do it justice. The research was the hardest thing because it was listening to testimonies, real individuals who had lived through that. It was really quite unsettling and disturbing. I contacted an Austrian TV company who sent me these clips of little known films and documentaries of the killing clinics and I’d be sitting there watching these films of people telling their memories and the things they saw… which was difficult. A lot of the stories are taken from real stories.
Did you ever think that maybe I should tone down for the readers?
Writing the actual scenes was very draining but I was very immersed in it. It came very fast because I saw it so vividly and felt it so strongly. But I think I did at the editing stage. I didn’t water it down in that way, but I just reduced the amount of material in there. But I think I felt like people should see.
What are your favourite writers and influences?
I’ve got some favourite writers that I find massively inspiring. I don’t know if their style is really ever detectable in mine as I write quite differently to them but, absolutely love Margaret Atwood. She’s my favourite. Crazy about J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, that kind of thing. Really like Steinbeck, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami. Very different to what I’m writing but they’re someone to aspire to.
Would you say that music has a lot of influence to your writing?
It’s hard to know whether they influence each other as such but I think there’s something similar in my relationship to each of them. I go into a similar sort of imaginative state when I go into either of them.
I think a lot of what I love about writing is what I love about music which is that kind of slightly unconscious instinctive relationship you can have with words, the same you can with melody which is following the melody of language and following the rhythm in words. So for me one of the biggest pleasures is contracting a sentence which is beautiful to me. And that can be a bit of a downfall because it makes it more difficult to chop sections out if you’ve fallen in love with your sentences.
Do you think writer’s block exist? Do you struggle with it?
I don’t know. I’ve never really known what that means.
Is it a lazy phrase?
Perhaps it is, because it makes it sound like it’s a syndrome that writers suffer from. Like oh, you’ve got writer’s block, well, what can you do? Whereas I think it must be different for each writer, and I think it’s something to work on, something to solve, if you find yourself getting blocked. Whether it is blocked for ideas or blocked in terms of getting something down, or continuing with a project.
What do they call that? That inner critic, like you’re faking it. Imposter syndrome?
Yeah people feel fraudulent like they’re not the real thing, or they feel demotivated because there are so many good ideas out there already that they can’t possibly do it. And all this negative dialogue. And I think it’s about analysing what writing is to you. If you keep coming up against that sort of a block then, are you pinning too much of your self esteem to writing, and it’s so crucial that you can’t even begin? Like if I fail at this, then I can’t bear it so I’m going to never even start and I’m going to dismiss every idea before I even pursue it?
Yep that’s me.
And I’ve done that loads. And I think a lot of writers are very sensitive people. They may have struggled at times and writing kind of dovetails into that. And it’s a challenge to work out how to make it play in your favour. Once you’ve sussed out how you can stop yourself from sabotaging yourself and harness it in a more positive way. Like okay, I sort of need this self-expression because I can’t get it out any other way. And I’m going to learn to conquer this inner critic.
That’s a really good way of putting it. Kind of like talking back to the inner critic and saying no, I have to do this.
Yeah, I suppose it’s hard but, follow that buzz it gives you and let that be the reason that you write. That pleasure and it’s freedom and it’s exciting and all those things. But it depends on your mood doesn’t it? I had loads of days when I was disgusted and disappointed by what I had written but I’ve grown in confidence, especially after my Own Dear Brother.
Would you say that comes with experience then, and age?
Partly. I think it does from experience and affirmation of getting published. It is a confidence boost.
Would you recommend Creative Writing courses? To new writers? Wanna-be writers?
I think I would because my experience has been positive. I did a CW undergrad, then an MPhil course which I then converted into a CW PhD. I would recommend it because I think as long as your course is of a decent standard, you’ve got amazing role models, your tutors will generally be brilliant writers, poets, and they’ll know a lot of stuff that you need to know. It’s really exciting working with people like that. You get experience of testing your work live to a small readership, thickening your skin to criticism, understanding how beneficial criticism is, understanding what the reader wants from your work. You also meet people, other writers, become friends, network, also people in local area. Events and opportunities open up to you.
What’s your most favourite and least favourite thing about being a writer?
My most favourite is thinking up stories and being in another world. And developing that writer’s eye which, to me, is a state of heightened observance. Taking in detail and atmosphere, watching other people, thinking about stories and somehow seeing the stories in the world around you. It makes me feel very alive and connected. I love the relationship it makes me have with the world and with life, makes me feel like I’m getting the most out of things somehow.
The thing I hate most is I guess is that since being published… feeling unsure about myself. I was very happy in my own little world pre-publication, my novel was a means to an end. I didn’t think about how I’d feel after I’d arrived, I thought I would feel wonderful. But actually it’s like the horizon shifts again. And suddenly I’m a tiny fish in a huge pond. The parameters broaden and I think, ‘God, no one known who I am, I’m a complete newbie, will I ever write a well-received book?’ I’ve put all my eggs in one basket in a way and there’s a lot resting on it. Somehow success, has also pressed all my buttons, and has made me feel vulnerable in the long run. It makes me feel competitive, and it’s challenging me on a personal level.
Finally, what’s next for you?
I have to finish my PhD thesis now as soon as I can. I’m also writing an album for the band. We’re renaming the band, and we’re going to go in a bit of a different direction with our sound now. And I’m getting married in September so I’ve got a wedding to plan as well. So it’s going to be a busy summer and I’m of course going to be writing my next book.
QUOTE:
If I’d known then just how sensitive and highly charged is the subject of Austria’s Nazism, I don’t know if I’d have dared begin. I was, as someone put it, ‘pressing on bruises’. But I met with almost no hostility. A retired judge in his sixties said it was wonderful to meet someone so curious, that not many people knew, or asked about Austria. ... I wondered if I could do it all justice. The imperative to ‘get it right’ paralysed me at times. ... I tried to write, knowing this book was too important to abandon. I’d learned things few people knew, uncovered compelling stories, explored the moral ambiguity of my own background and another time
Shadows On The Wall
by Holly Müller
In the summer of 2009, I put my possessions in storage, terminated my UK rental agreement, and moved to my cousin’s empty apartment in Vienna. From this romantic and crumbling base, I researched my debut novel My Own Dear Brother.
Set in Austria during the latter stages of World War Two and the turbulent post war era when brutal Russian troops flooded the country, I’d given myself a tough task: to portray a foreign place, a distressing and complex period of history, and lesser-known aspects of the war.
Interviewing elderly Austrians to gain insight into these hidden stories was one of the most intense experiences of my life. Outpourings of memory that would soon be lost, accounts of trauma, resistance and defeat, of complicity in Nazi cruelty, and terror about the approaching Red Army. Via my Austrian family (I'm half-Austrian on my dad’s side) I contacted people as old as ninety, surprised how many were willing to meet, despite the gruelling questions I’d pose. Too raw, too close for comfort to ask my own Austrian grandfather, who’d been pro-Nazi, an eager Hitler Youth member, a German soldier, I was desperate to understand the uncomfortable realities.
Together with an interpreter, I traveled to mountain villages, to manicured wooden homes in Lower Austria, and tidy flats in the Viennese suburbs. I was welcomed with coffee, cake and whipped cream into gemütlich living rooms.
One eighty-seven year old talked for hours in incredible detail. She told of thirty Russians invading her childhood home, one soldier climbing to the attic room to peer in at her, a silhouette in the doorway. She showed me the former site of a small concentration camp, directly opposite her house. A memorial now marks the spot, listing an approximate number killed. During the war, she saw prisoners herded by guards along the street, forced to build walls or dig graves. ‘Pitiful,’ she said of their bare feet in winter, their emaciated bodies. ‘They looked so cold. But what could I do?’ Later she said ‘I was a Nazi back then.’ Anxiously she asked me not to disclose her name.
As I left, she gripped my hand, wished me luck with the book; she hoped we’d meet again. I felt a little shocked, a little choked. It struck me she’d needed this. Perhaps her last chance to speak without reserve, perhaps only possible because she knew she’d never see me again.
Another interviewee was quite the opposite. Eighty-nine and very sharp – a city-dweller – she’d resisted the regime. ‘I took one look at Hitler and knew he meant war. Why didn't everyone see that?’ Horrified, she’d taken action wherever possible. Drafted at a munitions factory, she’d ensured the bombs she constructed would never detonate, hoping to save lives and sabotage the war effort. Her speckled hands shifted in her lap as she described the final siege of Vienna, how desperate conscripts fought the tide of Soviets and how she’d stood in the street and persuaded men to lay down their arms. ‘It’s hopeless,’ she’d told them. Beside her, a pile of weaponry grew. If patrolling SS had caught her, she’d have been executed on the spot – no doubt. All this she’d done whilst raising a son by herself.
The interpreter and I shared a look of admiring disbelief.
If I’d known then just how sensitive and highly charged is the subject of Austria’s Nazism, I don’t know if I’d have dared begin. I was, as someone put it, ‘pressing on bruises’. But I met with almost no hostility. A retired judge in his sixties said it was wonderful to meet someone so curious, that not many people knew, or asked about Austria.
He told of Austria’s culpability, but also its suffering. He’d a keen interest in history, and showed me replicas of Nazi propaganda, an old copy of Mein Kampf, photos of the Eastern front, a dead horse spread-eagled in a deserted Russian town; a decapitated body in an army truck. In his cluttered apartment, the tall clock chimed many times before I was too tired to continue, my cheeks burning with the effort of communicating, with the intensity of what I was learning. ‘This very flat was commandeered by Russian officers during the occupation,’ he said. ‘My family had to squeeze into one room.’ Then, while showing me out, ‘My aunt was raped. A rejected suitor led the Russians to where she hid in the cellar. She finally told about it on her death bed.’ I tried to absorb this; tried to imagine.
Looking up at the Hofburg balcony where Hitler had addressed rapturous Viennese crowds in 1938, or dawdling amongst identical crosses marked Unbekannt Soldat (Unknown Soldier) in Zentralfriedhof graveyard, I wondered if I could do it all justice. The imperative to ‘get it right’ paralysed me at times. In the shaded apartment I tried to write, knowing this book was too important to abandon. I’d learned things few people knew, uncovered compelling stories, explored the moral ambiguity of my own background and another time. The process had been transformative and fascinating and the world of My Own Dear Brother had become deeper and more intricate. Histories now passing out of living memory were caught in a flickering light; I could see their shadows on the wall and was sure I could capture them.
A piece of fiction could never be real, but I’d persevere until I’d written something true.
Holly Müller is a novelist, short story writer, and musician. She is half Austrian and half Welsh and lives in Cardiff. Her debut novel, My Own Dear Brother, a historical fiction set in post war Austria, is published worldwide with Bloomsbury. She is currently working towards a PhD in Creative Writing and is the singer, lyricist and violinist in the band Hail! The Planes. You can follow her on Twitter.
Find out more about titles and buy the latest releases from Holly Müller at Bloomsbury.com
QUOTE:
compelling coming-of-age story and an unflinching study of both cruelty and courage
My Own Dear Brother
Andrea Kay
Reviewer's Bookwatch. (Nov. 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
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My Own Dear Brother
Holly Muller
Bloomsbury Press
175 Fifth Avenue, Suite 315, New York, NY 10010
www.bloomsbury.com
9781632865335, $28.00, HC, 464pp, www.amazon.com
It is 1944, and war has taken the men in Nazi-controlled Austria to the front line. For thirteen-year-old Ursula Hildesheim, life in the village of Felddorf remains almost as it was: bullied by her schoolmates, enlisted in endless chores by her mother and sister, thieving, and running wild with her adored older brother, Anton. But then Russian prisoners escape from the local concentration camp, her mother starts an affair with a married man, her only friend goes missing, and her brother's allegiance to the Hitler Youth emerges in shocking ways--and Ursula finds herself alone, disturbed by dark memories, and surrounded by threat. In this new world of conflict, Ursula discovers a bravery she has never known before and is forced to recognize that danger comes not only from the enemy at the door but from the enemy within. "My Own Dear Brother" is a compelling coming-of-age story and an unflinching study of both cruelty and courage. A consistently engaging read from beginning to end, "My Own Dear Brother" clearly establishes author Holly Muller as an exceptionally gifted novelist. While unreservedly recommended for community library General Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "My Own Dear Brother" is also available in a Kindle format ($19.99).
QUOTE:
Muller's writing is lyrical and haunting, and she allows readers to delve deeply into the universal themes of loyalty, morality, and courage in the face of extreme adversity.
Muller, Holly. My Own Dear Brother
Lyndsie Robinson
Library Journal. 141.14 (Sept. 1, 2016): p100.
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* Muller, Holly. My Own Dear Brother. Bloomsbury USA. Oct. 2016.464p. ISBN 9781632865335. $28; ebk. ISBN 9781632865359. F
This powerful coming-of age story tells of 13-year-old Ursula, who lives with her family in the small Austrian town of Felddorf in 1944. After her father's death on the Russian front, the family is thrown into turmoil, and Anton, the older brother Ursula idolizes, begins to display a cruelty that she can't understand. There are multiple hardships the family must endure; Russian prisoners escape from the local concentration camp and are brutally hunted down; Ursula's mother begins an affair with a married man; and Ursula's close friend, who is considered by some in the town to be "mentally deficient," is sent to a Nazi-run mental institution. Ursula then goes on a brave quest to rescue her friend from certain death. Midler's writing is lyrical and haunting, and she allows readers to delve deeply into the universal themes of loyalty, morality, and courage in the face of extreme adversity, VERDICT This well-researched and stark first novel paints an unflinching portrait of daily life in Austria under the Nazis and later Soviet occupation. Its adolescent protagonist may appeal to readers of Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief--Lyndsie Robinson, SUNY Oneonta Lib.
Robinson, Lyndsie
QUOTE:
intense, moving novel,
My Own Dear Brother
Publishers Weekly. 263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p61.
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My Own Dear Brother
Holly Muller. Bloomsbury, $28 (464p) ISBN 978-1-63286-533-5
In her debut novel, Muller explores Austria near the end of WWII through the eyes of a young girl whose coming of-age is fraught with the dangers of the times. In 1944 Austria, Ursula Hildesheim is 13 years old and facing the dangers of Nazi occupation, hunger, and fear as her father has been missing since the Battle of Stalingrad. Ursula worries about her brother, Anton, who is now a member of the Hitler Youth. A friendship develops between Ursula's mother, who is having an affair with a married man, and Frau Hillier, mother of Schosi, a boy with mental disabilities. This relationship will help the women bond through the changes at the end of the war, including the brutality of the Russian occupation. Ursula's reaction to the changes to the world around her as she is forced to grow up too quickly provides an eye-opening view of the suffering of the innocents of war. Yet what resonates most about Mullers intense, moving novel is the revelation that some of those who helped end Nazi rule may have treated the women and children worse than the previous Nazi occupiers. (Oct.)
QUOTE:
this tough, unflinching novel illuminates the cost of war on those most closely affected.
MY OWN DEAR BROTHER
by Holly Müller
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Müller, who lives in Wales, adds to the recent spate of novels written about the German experience of World War II with her debut about a young Austrian girl forced to face the moral ambiguities war presents.
In a rural Austrian village in 1944, 13-year-old Ursula lives with her 14-year-old brother, Anton, her 16-year-old sister, Dorli, and their army-widow mother, Mali, who came from a larger town and has never been accepted by the locals. Anton is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth who gladly kills an escaped prisoner from the local POW camp. Despite her devotion to Anton, Ursula finds herself attracted to independent-minded Sepp, whom her brother considers “a bad type,” and also befriends her gentle, mentally challenged neighbor, Schosi. Schosi’s widowed, compassionately Christian mother, Frau Hillier, shields him from the attention of the local Nazi hierarchy as much as possible, and instead of attending school, he works for local farmer Herr Esterbauer, who feels deep affection for both mother and son. When Mali is shunned at church after beginning an affair with family friend Siegfried, Frau Hillier sits beside her in support. Anton’s behavior becomes increasingly vicious against Schosi; Mali, who has become pregnant; and Siegfried, with terrible consequences for each. The villagers’ lives, barely sustainable as the war winds down, plummet into degradation and depravity once the Russians arrive. Müller explores difficult questions concerning what defines personal morality during a period of collective malevolence. Is Anton, who enjoys drowning cats, evil or merely a troubled child infected by fascism? What to make of a man like Herr Esterbauer, who supports Nazi principles but shows genuine decency (and tenderness) in his protection of Schosi? In Ursula’s coming-of-moral-age story, she learns where she owes loyalty, what she can forgive, and how much she is willing to risk for principles or for love.
Despite a soft landing at the end, this tough, unflinching novel illuminates the cost of war on those most closely affected.
Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-533-5
Page count: 464pp
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 20th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2016
QUOTE:
captivating and haunting from the first page until the last.
My Own Dear Brother by Holly Müller – review
‘On the surface, the novel is simply about war but if you look a little deeper, it’s about love and loss in a society where people have been numbed to pain and sorrow’
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90skids
Thursday 11 February 2016 04.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 14.00 EDT
Holly Müller’s first novel has to be one of the most emotive accounts of life in Nazi Austria that I’ve ever read. Told through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Ursula Hildesheim, it’s partly a novel about the effects of war but also about growing up.
The novel begins with Ursula the child recounting how she has always been afraid of St. Nicholas coming to her house to punish her for her sins and ends with an Ursula who seems much older and wiser than her tender years.
My Own Dear Brother details Austria’s journey from being ruled by Nazi Germany to being ruled by Soviet Russia and whilst the soldiers in the war are struggling, Ursula is struggling alongside them. From the moment her best friend Schosi is taken away to the infamous Hartburg Hospital and she and Herr Esterbauer embark on a quest to retrieve him, to the terrifying months after the Soviet soldiers first arrive, bringing rape and destruction with them, My Own Dear Brother is twisted from beginning to end.
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On the surface, the novel is simply about the war but if you look a little deeper, it’s about love and loss in a society where people have been numbed to pain and sorrow. However, whilst the characters might have been anesthetised, we are able to feel their sorrow for them and whilst I can’t say too much more without giving the game away, I can tell you that death is not the only source of pain in Müller’s novel; sometimes the pain comes from within us and one of the most painful things in life is the things that we try so hard to forget.
My Own Dear Brother is captivating and haunting from the first page until the last which is why I was thrilled when I was given the chance to review it by the Guardian Children’s Books team. I haven’t been able to put it down from the moment it arrived on my doormat so sadly my copy is now extremely dog-eared!
QUOTE:
Notwithstanding a difficult anticlimax, the novel’s ending satisfies. Ursula still feels uncertain about her future, but she feels an undercurrent of hope that did not exist before, perhaps because, during the war, she did not have much to wish for beyond survival. In the end, My Own Dear Brother is a touching chronicle of some of the lesser-known casualties of war and of the resilience of human spirit despite those difficulties
My Own Dear Brother: A Novel
By Holly Müller Bloomsbury USA 464 pp.
Reviewed by Mariko Hewer
October 31, 2016
A young girl takes on Nazi-occupied Austria while searching for an imprisoned friend.
Sometimes a tragedy is so great we have to break it down into pieces to understand it.
And sometimes one of those pieces seems so much more horrific, more graphic, more shameful than the others that it gets thrown into the spotlight while smaller tragedies, embedded as they are in the greater whole, are overlooked.
My Own Dear Brother, a novel about a young girl growing up in Nazi-occupied Austria, breaks apart the tragedy of the Holocaust to examine Aktion T4, Hitler’s program of forced euthanasia, as well as the difficulties experienced by citizens of occupied countries after World War II ended.
Ursula Hildesheim lives in a rural community where village status traditionally meant more than Nazi Party membership and where the war goes largely unnoticed beyond rationing and occasional glimpses of the Russian prisoners in the camp near the center of town.
At 13, Ursula is a shabby outsider, living on the outskirts of town and running wild — lying, stealing, and generally caring for no one but herself and her adored brother, Anton (although sharp-eyed readers might notice that Ursula’s mental view of her brother’s love — “brothers love sisters with hot fury, try to rule them, to keep them” — is not necessarily a healthy one).
One night, however, the local Nazi Party inspector knocks on Ursula’s mother’s door with word that Russian prisoners have escaped. Anton kills one of them, and Ursula’s world is forever upended.
As the Hitler Youth celebrate Anton for his bravery, Ursula’s widowed mother begins an affair with a married man, and Ursula feels both her brother and her mother being pulled away from the previously tight-knit family unit. Anton’s embarrassment with their mother’s behavior unleashes in him a casual cruelty and short temper that Ursula has never seen — or at least been willing to see — before.
When the Hildesheim children visit a nearby frozen stream with Schosi, a mentally challenged boy from the next farm over, Anton throws a kitten into a hole to watch it drown, to the horror of Schosi and Ursula: “She thought of Anton’s face as he’d turned from the hole, his eyes narrower than usual, a small hard smile on his lips…‘You’re not supposed to enjoy it,’” she tells him.
Ursula hopes that this episode is an exception, but Anton’s behavior becomes ever more extreme as she befriends Schosi. Eventually, jealous of their relationship, Anton alerts the local officials to the boy’s mental deficiencies, and Schosi is exiled to a hospital in Vienna where mentally ill and “socially abnormal” children are, under the guise of being treated, killed by poisoning or starvation.
Although the readers get glimpses of Schosi’s point of view before his removal, here the story splits and the reader begins to follow two narratives: the first, that of Ursula and her elderly neighbor, Herr Esterbauer, who search for Schosi; the second, that of Schosi and the horrors he endures at the hospital.
Müller’s strength as a storyteller shines as she details Schosi’s abuse in a gruesome yet not gratuitous manner. It’s difficult to read about how he is submitted to what we today might describe as waterboarding — “Breath left him in a violent stream of shock — the water was icy cold. His lungs were emptied and he opened his mouth. Cold water rushed in and he swallowed instinctively, only for more water to flood in.”
Moments of unexpected kindness, as when Schosi and a friend drape blankets over children who have been left in a cold room to freeze to death, make this story bearable as well as humanizing: These children, whom the Nazi regime sees as the dregs of society, have more compassion than their captors.
Although Ursula and Herr Esterbauer’s story is more exciting than Schosi’s, it is also more farfetched. It seems hard to believe that anyone would attempt to break into a Nazi-controlled hospital, yet this is the best strategy Ursula and the farmer can muster, and the long-term outcome seems to beggar imagination.
As part of this storyline, Müller also seems to be trying to portray an increasingly mature Ursula (one who doesn’t steal or disobey her elders and who thinks of others before herself), but scenes such as one where she kicks Herr Esterbauer to temporarily elude him and another during which she repeatedly refuses to return home despite his pleas make the reader wonder how much she has really grown.
Notwithstanding a difficult anticlimax, the novel’s ending satisfies. Ursula still feels uncertain about her future, but she feels an undercurrent of hope that did not exist before, perhaps because, during the war, she did not have much to wish for beyond survival.
In the end, My Own Dear Brother is a touching chronicle of some of the lesser-known casualties of war and of the resilience of human spirit despite those difficulties.
Mariko Hewer is a born-and-raised Washingtonian whose hobbies include reading, running, and writing. Her favorite food is saag paneer.
QUOTE:
Ursula never loses her love or concern for her brother, despite her clear-eyed understanding of his misdeeds and cruelty, and her misgivings about his enthusiasm for the Nazis. This endows My Own Dear Brother with a moral ambiguity that Muller handles with verve and integrity
MAY 14 2016
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My Own Dear Brother review: Holly Muller's wartime story of adolescence and evil
Andrew Riemer
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My Own Dear Brother
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Fiesty first novel: Writer and singer Holly Muller.
Fiesty first novel: Writer and singer Holly Muller. Photo: Supplied
HOLLY MULLER
BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS, $29.99
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My Own Dear Brother, by Holly Muller.
My Own Dear Brother, by Holly Muller. Photo: Supplied
Holly Muller is a writer and singer who lives in Cardiff, Wales. Her mother is Welsh, her father Austrian. She teaches creative writing at the University of South Wales. This is her first novel.
It seems to me highly unlikely that she knows anything about another feisty first novel published just over 20 years ago, The Hand that Signed the Paper, by a then 22-year-old calling herself Helen Demidenko. Yet, curiously, I was struck by an odd similarity between these two novels. Like Helen Darville (Demidenko's real name), Muller explores a territory fraught with dangers for a writer who obviously could not have first-hand knowledge of it: the experiences of people living in small communities during crucial phases of World War II.
There are major differences, of course. I assume that Muller's Austrian identity is not a blatant invention like Darville's Ukrainian masquerade. And, assuredly, almost nothing in My Own Dear Brother could lead to suspicions of anti-Semitism of the kind that raised a disproportionate fuss over Darville's novel. Besides, the setting here is not Ukraine at the beginning of World War II but a village in Lower Austria during the last months of the war in 1944 and 1945.
Yet the focus in both novels is similar. In both, an adolescent, on the threshold of manhood, his hormones and resentments raging, gets caught up in evil beyond his comprehension.
In Darville's novel, a young Ukrainian becomes a fervent participant in the mass extermination of Jews. In Muller's novel, Anton, an Austrian lad, is guilty of less horrendous deeds, but in their own way his actions are just as evil. Yet throughout Muller's novel, Anton's sister Ursula never loses her love or concern for her brother, despite her clear-eyed understanding of his misdeeds and cruelty, and her misgivings about his enthusiasm for the Nazis.
This endows My Own Dear Brother with a moral ambiguity that Muller handles with verve and integrity, something that many people saw lacking in Darville's novel – in large part, I think, because of her posturing and deceptions.
The people of Felddorf, the village where Ursula (who is on the verge of puberty) lives with her widowed mother, her brother and her elder sister Dorli, aren't particularly troubled by the system under which they live. They grumble, it is true, about the bossiness of the local Party officials, about the shortages and privations they have to endure, and they resent the prisoner-of-war camp for Russians on the edge of their village. Nevertheless, when some of those prisoners attempt to escape, many, including Anton, hunt them down eagerly with rifles and knives – that was, after all, your duty as good citizens.
Only one of the people of Felddorf, Frau Hillier, experiences the evil wrought in the name of Germany and the Fuhrer. She tries to protect her retarded son Schosi from the guardians of racial purity, but eventually, thanks in part to Anton's machinations, he is discovered and taken to a psychiatric institution in Vienna where the process of killing him slowly gets under way. A long episode in which Ursula and a kindly farmer from Felddorf accomplish the rescue of Schosi from that prison-like hospital is the only contrivance-filled part of an otherwise poised novel.
Muller must have relied on family reminiscences in this intricately detailed portrait of village life. The people of Felddorf – and outsiders such as the black-marketeer Siegfried from Vienna in his gleaming black limousine, who fathers a child with Ursula's mother – are vividly depicted and shrewdly observed.
I am fully aware of the danger of saying the following: the world evoked here – apart perhaps from the interpolated rescue-story – strikes me as fundamentally true. Certainly Muller's description of the coming of the Russians in 1945 matches closely how I remember their arrival in Budapest only a few weeks earlier.
The novel's original title, Krampus, echoes the sense of foreboding that many of the people of Felddorf experienced as the Third Reich was falling apart and the Russian were advancing westwards. Krampuses are the devil-like creatures who, in South German and Austrian folklore, accompany Saint Nicholas on his journeys on December 6 each year, showering those children who were good the previous year with sweets, and those who had been naughty with sound thrashings. An edifying myth.
My Own Dear Brother
BY HOLLY MÜLLER
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If you have a personal security blanket, I recommend you have it close by when reading this book. Any book about World War II tends to be an emotional, upsetting read, but this one is especially disturbing. Young Ursula Hildesheim worships her brother Anton, but he doesn’t approve of their widowed mother’s lover, nor Ursula’s friend, gentle but mentally slow, Schosi. With a word in the right ear, Hitler Youth Anton gets the lover sent off to the People’s Army, and most heartbreakingly, gets Schosi removed from his loving mother and sent to a mental hospital, deemed deficient. His actions are a chilling reminder of what happens under totalitarianism.
Anton is unrepentant and unredeemable, but other characters have more compassion. Schosi’s mother, Frau Hillier, stands by Frau Hildesheim when the rest of the village shuns her on account of her affair. Herr Esterbauer, Frau Hillier’s employer, fights for Schosi’s release from the hospital in Vienna. Ursula, her friends, and family need all the kindness they can get because the end of the war brings Russian occupation to the village. The soldiers move into Ursula’s home and rape Ursula, her mother, and sister. Their cruelty and violence is as horrific as the Nazis had displayed.
The book is unrelenting in its display of man’s inhumanity to man, and after I finished it, I had to think about whether I liked it or not, or if “like” is even a word to apply to it. Müller has created complex characters living through the most difficult of times, and I think her book needs to be read. As dark as it is, it bears out Anne Frank’s words that “people are good at heart.”
QUOTE:
While war frames the novel, the themes of love, loyalty, and courage dominate it. It is not so much about the war as it is about coming of age in such a time. There are glimmers of hope, despite the psychological trauma and heartbreak. If there is a weak spot then it is that the mystery behind Anton and Ursula’s tightly knit relationship is too predictable. Yet, despite being ‘historical fiction’, My Own Dear Brother offers a refreshingly new perspective and has an immediacy of the present to it
DATE: 10.04.16 WRITTEN BY: DURRE SHAHWAR POSTED IN: RECOMMENDED, REVIEWS, LITERATURE
FICTION | MY OWN DEAR BROTHER BY HOLLY MÜLLER
9781408866771
£14.99, Pp. 445, Bloomsbury Publishing
Rarely do we read novels that tell the story from the other side of the Nazi Regime. And when we do, rarely do we expect them to evoke as much empathy, fear and attachment towards the characters as does Holly Müller’s debut novel, My Own Dear Brother (2016). Set near the end of the Second World War, the novel follows the life of 13-year-old Ursula Hildesheim in the village of Felddorf. With Austria under Nazi control, and the men away to fight at the front line, Ursula is left behind in the rural village with her mother, sister and brother, Anton, whom she much dotes upon.
During the war, life in Felddorf is as normal as it can be. But Russian prisoners escape from a nearby concentration camp, one of which Anton shoots, and the incident becomes a symbolic mark for the beginning of change and the domino effect of events that follow. The school closes, questions of loyalty arise, and Ursula embarks on a challenging and dark journey towards becoming a young woman through the loss of innocence during the war. She also befriends Schosi Hillier, a young boy with a learning disability, who grows attached to her, whom Anton hugely dislikes. Yet Ursula has a blind spot when it comes to Anton, a member of the Hitler Youth, whose cruel and violent nature towards Schosi increases as the novel progresses, causing a rift in their relationship.
Müller’s characters are very real and multi-dimensional. As a protagonist, Ursula is rebellious and headstrong. She commits petty theft, roams the village, and adamantly accompanies Herr Esterbauer on a mission to rescue Schosi after he is taken to the Hartburg hospital, infamous for its horrific ‘treatments’ and torture towards disabled and mentally ill children during the war. Schosi’s character becomes an embodiment of vulnerable children who suffered and died at the hands of the inhumane. Müller unflinchingly withholds nothing when describing Schosi’s and other children’s experiences at the hospital.
My Own Dear Brother also contains elements of Austrian folklore. Many of the characters embody Krampus, a menacing folklore figure, who appears at Christmas to punish children who have misbehaved. The themes of fear and the impact of the war on young children is a major one, which reminds the reader of the Kindertransport stories; Müller seems to want to tell the story of the children that could not so easily escape the Regime from a new perspective. Her technique of narrating indirectly from the point of the view of the innocent, be it at the hospital or when the Russians invade the village, raping young girls and women, is highly effective. It is not so much that the novel aims for the ‘shock factor’, but to depict the realities of the time as they were. The realities of the way the war tore apart small families and villages, turned neighbours against one another, and how families still had to go to work and somehow put food on the table every evening.
Müller captures the ‘small village mentality’ perfectly; people gossip, Ursula’s family is shunned out of church once her mother starts an affair with a married man, they are looked down upon due to their poor clothes, their shoeless feet. Müller depicts how Hitler’s regime and control filtered down even on a smaller level; no one could be trusted to keep a secret. The novel is filled with tension and suspense; there is a constant threat and danger to life. It shows how the most unimaginable and harrowing situations were adapted to for the sake of survival, such as when the Russians invade the village and the Hildesheims are forced to play house with many of the officers. It gets to the point that the reader questions which authority was the better of two evils.
While war frames the novel, the themes of love, loyalty, and courage dominate it. It is not so much about the war as it is about coming of age in such a time. There are glimmers of hope, despite the psychological trauma and heartbreak. If there is a weak spot then it is that the mystery behind Anton and Ursula’s tightly knit relationship is too predictable. Yet, despite being ‘historical fiction’, My Own Dear Brother offers a refreshingly new perspective and has an immediacy of the present to it. Split into three subsequent parts, the plot is authentic, instantly gripping and fast-paced. 455 pages are usually a daunting read, but Holly Müller has a skill for making each page count and being significant to the overall story.
Müller herself has Austrian roots, which no doubt influenced and informed the intense research behind the story. Part of that research was undertaken in Vienna, and that, combined with her tremendous imagination and poetic style of writing, makes My Own Dear Brother a highly impressive debut.
QUOTE:
Muller’s first novel ... is notably ambitious in scope. For the most part, its careful and measured plot is quietly captivating. The experience of reading a story such as this easily could have been an endurance test, with innumerable pitfalls and punctuated by a world of horrors. In fact, Muller creates a flawed and vulnerable young heroine we believe in as she copes as best she can with brutal circumstance after brutal circumstance. This is a coming-of-age novel set during the worst of times and it compels belief
My Own Dear Brother: Evil lurks in sibling of warped ideology
KATHERINE GILLESPIE
The Australian12:00AM April 16, 2016
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Life was probably rather difficult for most people living in Nazi Austria in 1944, but it must have been especially hard on teenage girls. Certainly Ursula Hildesheim, the 13-year-old protagonist of Holly Muller’s My Own Dear Brother, clambers over more than her fair share of hurdles as she is forced to grow up quickly in the bitter last few months of a terrible war.
Ursula, her mother and siblings live in the small, heavily traditional village of Felddorf outside Vienna. For a naive young girl living in an insular farming community, the conflict raging nearby remains an abstract concept even when guns are fired in the night and SS guards arrest the neighbours.
Life revolves around family and the loss of family. Ursula’s father has been killed on the frontline, leaving her mother to manage the household alone. Her older brother Anton, whom Ursula idolises, is enmeshed in the Hitler Youth movement and becoming increasingly senseless in his violence towards those around him.
Meanwhile, there are food shortages, air raids and schoolyard crushes to be contended with.
Muller’s novel is an eerily casual juxtaposition of the everyday and horrific. Many of Ursula’s ordinary teenage experiences unfold as normal, devastated though they are every now and then with piercing moments of terror and uncertainty.
Starving prisoners escape from a nearby concentration camp, briefly terrorising the village in a desperate quest for food and shelter. A whispered criticism of Mein Kampf very nearly falls on the wrong ears. But for the most part, things hold together and life is endured surprisingly well, despite the inexorable character of the flailing war in the distance as it grows exponentially closer.
Adolescent angst is always at its most poignant in a wartime setting and Muller’s heroine is compelling as she wrestles with inner and outer turmoil. The novel is powered by its protagonist’s filtered observations of the adults around her, their tangled relationships and deceits as she begins to set her own moral compass. She is frequently overcome and so, as a consequence the reader, by “the feeling of such love, which pulled downwards and was more important than anything, but unhappier than anything too because it was lonely”.
It is Ursula’s friendship with a mentally disabled neighbour, Schosi, that sets her apart from her family, and estranges her older brother, Anton, with whom she had been close. When Schosi is reported to the Nazi authorities, taken from his home and placed in a horrific Viennese asylum, Ursula embarks on a fraught mission to bring him home safely. It is in this context that we see her begin to grow up, lose her innocence and rise to several significant challenges, not least of which is standing up to her brother.
Much of this coming-of-age story is rendered in a deliberately affectless and apparently callous style; Muller’s details are left vague or made clinical in their precision. The writing is rarely ornate; it tends rather to be cold as though to match an unforgiving wintry European landscape — a “soggy expanse … full of danger and disorientating things”.
Perhaps elaboration would miss the point. When the Red Army soldiers finally reach the village — as they have threatened to do throughout the book — Muller describes their repeated sexual assaults with the same brusqueness she applies to the scenes that depict Ursula’s difficulties making friends at school or the banalities the young girl encounters as she does her daily farm chores.
And so there is the constant, understated sense of dark and intrinsic evil lurking beneath everything. It is gestured at roughly and approximately and with implicit disgust. In fact there are several evils, each seemingly as nasty as one another. Swastikas are proudly displayed on sleeves and portraits of Hitler preside over fireplaces, but the most malevolent presence in My Own Dear Brother is that of the Krampus, a two-legged horned beast arising from Bavarian folklore with a “rancid pelt” and “eyes bulging as big as onions”.
Ursula is haunted by visions of this yuletide monster, who punishes naughty children at Christmas by beating them with sticks. The Krampus is a harsh festival tradition — appropriately embraced by a panoptical and paranoid rural village where vicious gossip rules — that has the potential to devastate. Surveillance is constant in Felddorf and any kind of disobedience meets with severity and vengeance.
As Ursula’s brother’s cruel spasms of violence towards his sister and everyone around him become unmanageable, we start to realise with horror that some evils may be inherent, that character may be fated: one sibling is the pawn of a warped fascist ideology, the other chooses love and gentleness.
My Own Dear Brother is Muller’s first novel and is notably ambitious in scope. For the most part, its careful and measured plot is quietly captivating. The experience of reading a story such as this easily could have been an endurance test, with innumerable pitfalls and punctuated by a world of horrors. In fact, Muller creates a flawed and vulnerable young heroine we believe in as she copes as best she can with brutal circumstance after brutal circumstance. This is a coming-of-age novel set during the worst of times and it compels belief.
Katherine Gillespie is a Melbourne-based writer and editor.
My Own Dear Brother
By Holly Muller
Bloomsbury Circus, 458pp, $29.99