21st Century Literature discussion

Please don't read any further if spoilers will bother you.

Use this space to discuss Werner. For instance:

How did Werner develop as a character in your eyes throughout the novel? What effect did his friendship with Frederick have on him? How did you feel about Werner's fate? Did it seem to 'fit' to you, or would you rather have seen another ending for him?

I would so much have liked Werner to live. He felt more real to me than Marie. Werner was always someone who cared and took care of people. He was so afraid of the mines, however, that he grabbed the chance to go to the elite school and modified his natural instincts. I think Frederick took Jutta's place in his life by being the person who insisted on doing the right or fair or decent thing. Werner regretted what he had not done and his redemption was what he did do for Marie.

Linda wrote: "I would so much have liked Werner to live. He felt more real to me than Marie. Werner was always someone who cared and took care of people. He was so afraid of the mines, however, that he grabbe..."

I agree, Linda. I wanted both Marie and Werner to survive. However, I do think Doerr was more realistic in having him die.

Werner was remarkable in that he stayed pure of heart in spite of attending the Nazi school and in spite of the horrors he witnessed. He was a good friend to Frederick as he had been a good brother to Jutta. He hid Marie and Etienne's radio transmission, when even his duty as a soldier would have required him to report the information.

Maureen wrote: "Werner was remarkable in that he stayed pure of heart in spite of attending the Nazi school and in spite of the horrors he witnessed. He was a good friend to Frederick as he had been a good brother to Jutta. He hid Marie and Etienne's radio transmission, when even his duty as a soldier would have required him to report the information. "

I agree that Werner was a good person, but he struggled with being pure in the same way as Frederick and, I think, Jutta. Yes he did hide the radio transmissions, more, I think, because he recognized the song and it reminded him of Jutta and the good days of childhood than because Etienne was transmitting info to the resistance. More impressive to me was that Volkheimer knew he was hiding the transmissions, even before Werner told him, and did not threaten him or turn him in, as was his duty as a soldier to do.

Linda wrote: "I agree that Werner was a good person, but he struggled with being pure in the same way as Frederick..."

Frederick and Werner both illustrated aspects of the bullying problems that school districts are still wrestling with how to deal.

Linda wrote: "...More impressive to me was that Volkheimer knew he was hiding the transmissions, even before Werner told him, and did not threaten him or turn him in, as was his duty as a soldier to do...."

Why impressive versus needing the skills of Werner to do the work for which they were both responsible? Then there is the comrade-in-arms aspect of being soldiers working together where their lives depend on each other. Do you I hear you saying that you think Volkheimer was beginning to be sympathetic to the Resistance, or at least antagonistic to the war as being fought by the Germans, and so taking a non-demonstrative moral stance of protecting whomever Werner was protecting? (He may have been; I'm just trying to think what text sways the story one way or the other, or to figure out if I understand.)

Volkheimer protected Werner like a brother. It was definitely NOT about needing Werner's skills to do the work. And I doubt Volkheimer had any feelings about the Resistance but he did love Werner.

I was reading bits near the end of AtLWCS tonight and was drawn to the description in "Jutta," Chapter 169, of Volkheimer's arrival with Werner's duffel bag. I was reminded of other tales of war veterans seeking families to bring them artifacts of the fate of lost ones, such as in Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers the rather controversial story of the U-boat discovered about sixty miles off the shore of New Jersey in the 1990's. There was no designated officer to deliver the news, as in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin.

Parallel, yet achingly different, is the story of Marie and Etienne searching for her father and finding only enough records to imply his possible fate.

Having lost an uncle in the air over Okinawa in the closing days of WWII, I know that there are many of us who personally have experienced such enigmatic losses, many far more up close than myself. Months, twenty, fifty-plus years later, how do we recall and integrate them....with stories told again and again?

"Even before she nods, before he says, 'I have something for you,' before she invites him through the screen door, she knows this will be about Werner."

Doerr, Anthony (2014-05-06). All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (p. 501). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

"Despite hiring an investigator, spending thousands of francs, and poring through reams of German documentation, Marie-Laure and Etienne were never able to determine what exactly happened to her father. They confirmed he had been a prisoner at a labor camp called Breitenau in 1942. And there was a record made by a camp doctor at a subcamp in Kassel, Germany, that a Daniel LeBlanc contracted influenza in the first part of 1943. That’s all they have."

Ibid. (p. 511). Kindle Edition.

The critic Bakhtin wrote of "dialogic," the ability of the past to impact the present, of the present to impact the past; at least how humans integrate the past into the present and the future. Is this part of what Doerr is playing with in this book?

How did Werner develop as a character in your eyes throughout the novel?
Werner impressed me and sometimes disappointed me throughout the story. He was loving and nurturing to his sister, and had high hopes for his own future despite his situation (orphan German boy in a mining town in WW2). He found a way to adjust his destiny; how could he have ever conceived of the evil the Nazis had in store for the children of Germany. Ironically, the victims were not only those imprisoned by the regime, but those figuratively held captive by a totalitarian, terrorizing government that focused on the end and cared not about the means. I agree with Maureen that Werner maintained his values despite the training and programming at the school. He did not always do what his heart urged him to do. Honestly, in the face of serious repercussions, I'm not sure many would.

He stuck with Frederick throughout their time at school, and urged him to quit or at least go home for a bit to deflect the hatred Werner couldn't stand being directed at his friend. Frederick opted to remain. It was heartbreaking that such a phenomenal individual would be brutalized. It was no surprise that he was a target. He represented what the youth were supposed to suppress.

I was very sad that Werner survived the war, but didn't get to live his life. He was brilliant and kindhearted. I thought he an Marie would have lived an idyllic life together, but I'm a hopeless romantic.

Kerri wrote: "I was very sad that Werner survived the war, but didn't get to live his life. He was brilliant and kindhearted. I thought he an Marie would have lived an idyllic life together, but I'm a hopeless romantic. . ."

I wonder if, in his ten years of writing this novel, Doerr was ever tempted to let Werner and Marie get together. Humanly, I would have thought it must have been a great temptation as a writer. But I'm not certain it would have conveyed what Doerr seems to have struggled with saying about war and its aftermath. And I even ask, what is Doerr's theme? He hints at it with his title, but that can be taken so many directions. War, no more, please -- is it that simple? One could speak, too, of the light that was not allowed to be.

I find a place of deep sadness when I think of the loss of Marie's father and the vain search to learn conclusively his journey. Here was Etienne, who had shut himself up and closed himself in at the end of WWI, protecting Marie, acting for the Resistance, searching for Daniel LeBlanc -- the text says of the end of their trail: "a Daniel LeBlanc," no certainty it was even a record for Marie's father.

Why do I want to know the fate of a glittering diamond? One recalls the photographs on the walls of Holocaust museums, the crosses w/o names in Flanders Fields-Normandy-Arlington, the fading monuments at Saint Malo and in dinky towns and parks across the globe. What is worth, what is value? (The world still revels at find of a cache of long disappeared art works.)

"...It’s the absence of all the bodies, she [Jutta] thinks, that allows us to forget. It’s that the sod seals them over."

Ibid. (p. 517). Kindle Edition.

"...It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings—always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father’s name."

Ibid. (p. 512). Kindle Edition.

"...On a pocked and lichen-splotched cement wall is bolted a small stone plaque. Ici a été tué Buy Gaston Marcel agé de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 août 1944. Jutta sits on the ground. The sea is heavy and slate-gray. There are no plaques for the Germans who died here."

Ibid. (p. 509). Kindle Edition.

Lily wrote: "Kerri wrote: "I was very sad that Werner survived the war, but didn't get to live his life. He was brilliant and kindhearted. I thought he an Marie would have lived an idyllic life together, but I'..."

Doerr did an exquisite job conveying the unspeakable horrors of war. Dehumanizing the enemy is one way that armies prepare soldiers to perform acts they would never otherwise consider.

Kerri wrote: "...Dehumanizing the enemy is one way that armies prepare soldiers to perform acts they would never otherwise consider. ..."

Kerri -- what do you consider to be a particularly egregious example of such in AtLWCS? Or do you think Doerr comes to that from the back door?

Lily wrote: "Kerri wrote: "...Dehumanizing the enemy is one way that armies prepare soldiers to perform acts they would never otherwise consider. ..."

Kerri -- what do you consider to be a particularly egregi..."

I think he comes straight out with the realities of war - rape, pillaging, murder, robbing the weak and dead, and marching children into war knowing they will soon be slaughtered.

Dehumanizing the enemy was mentioned throughout as the French described the German soldiers they were expecting in their streets (some of what they believed was accurate, much was not), and the Germans trained their soldiers to see everyone else as unworthy. This sentiment was acted upon by Volkheimer (I was waiting with bated breath for him to force Werner to kill Marie), Newman 1 & 2, and the soldiers that found Frau Elena, Jutta and the other girls.

Kerri wrote: "...the Germans trained their soldiers to see everyone else as unworthy. ..."

In the story, are you referring to acts like the forced hazing of the (German) soldiers among themselves?

Certainly we saw or heard about the acting in inhumane ways -- part of what I was looking for in a story like this revisiting the memories of war is the processes by which such inhumanity is inoculated.

Lily wrote: "Kerri wrote: "...the Germans trained their soldiers to see everyone else as unworthy. ..."

In the story, are you referring to acts like the forced hazing of the (German) soldiers among themselves?..."

I'm not sure what you mean by hazing among the German soldiers, but some specific examples would be when Volkheimer took clothes from prisoners, which was a death sentence for them, attacking civilians (which is now a war crime), and giving civilians fake ration cards in exchange for information, knowing they would be arrested for using them.

The ability to treat others that way starts with propaganda. The enemy is assigned a blanket term so people reference them as an entity rather than individuals with family ties and personal worth. Soldiers are also programmed to work as a unit and disregard their personal wants and feelings for the good of the company. They can't afford to have someone chicken out and have the entire unit put in jeopardy. Many vets have a terrible time reflecting on what they saw and what they did during wartime. My father went to WWII at 16 and never, ever spoke of what he saw when he was in Germany. My grandfather was a bit older when he was there, but shared very little. The only story I ever heard from him was when his unit was ambushed and he was shot.

Werner was definitely my favourite character. His death was tragic, he had had few joyful moments in his life, and they were all with Jutta and Frau Helena. What I find terribly sad is that he was utterly alone in the end. First he lost Jutta, then Frederik, then Volkheimer and then there's Marie, who didn't even suspect what she meant to poor Werner.
I think the last time I cried so much for the death of a fictional character was in Harry Potter (and I've grown up with those books!).