Book Review: The End and the Beginning
Brilliant novel set in Germany in the final days of World War II
K.J. Holden’s book, The End and the Beginning, is set in Germany in the terrible final months of World War II. Between January and May 1945, 1.1 million Wehrmacht soldiers died, more than a third of all German soldiers killed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians perished, too, as carpet bombing by the Allies and a murderous “final phase” in the concentration camps, prison camps, and work camps decimated huge numbers of people, many of them, women and children. Millions more were displaced.
Holden thrusts her two protagonists into this landscape: Marguerite, a French woman living on the border in Saarland, and her thirteen-year-old son, Max, a Hitler Youth conscripted to serve in the Volkssturm, Himmler’s Home Guard. The End is the story of the last days of German rule—a countdown to “Hour Zero,” as these days and months became known—the start of a new era.
As Holden deftly shows, though, this fresh start came with a huge cost to the German population, many of whom had actively supported, or at least been complicit, in Nazi rule. Holden encourages us to see the complexity of these choices, especially as the war shifted to German soil, particularly the villages and towns, and public sentiment vacillated between an increasingly unrealistic hope of victory and a near-paralyzing fear of defeat.
Many novels have been set in World War II, but the story of these final days hasn’t often been told, maybe because it is hard to avert our eyes from the atrocities that came before. But Holden gets us to care so deeply for Marguerite and Max that we stay with them, even as their world comes tumbling down. By compressing the timeline and focusing on these two characters, Holden encourages us to consider the very real human cost of war and displacement, which is still very relevant today.