Q&A
1. It’s notoriously hard to say what the beginnings of a book were, but, looking back, can you recall what first interested you in this material?
When I was about sixteen —without any idea that I would become a writer—I came across what I now know is a fairly often cited line by E. M. Forster: If I had to choose between my country and my friend, I hope to god I’d have the guts to choose my friend. Of course, as a teenager with an ardent heart, I instantly agreed with it. The line stayed with me the way those sorts of things do when we’re young, and from time to time I would play a kind of What if? game: What if a woman I loved was a spy, or accused of being one? How well would I really know her? Would I wonder if everything she’d said and done had simply been cover? And if I came to doubt her, who would I choose then: her or my country? Over time, my certainty waned. As a writer, reconsidering these questions, I wanted to explore what it would be like to be that woman, to be doubted by all who know you, even those who love you. Kate Zweig – the English widow of a German surgeon, living in war-time London and suspected of being a spy – grew out of that.
2. The first part of the book takes place in Germany in the months after WWI ended, beginning on the Eastern Front, moving to revolutionary Berlin, and ending in Hamburg, where the residents are slowly starving from the ongoing British blockade. The second half is set in London in 1944, just after D-Day, where the citizens are suffering from German V1 rockets. Those are the big events. Did any smaller historical incidents help shape the book?
I read about a course case titled U.S. vs. Spirit of ’76, the irony of which I couldn’t ignore. It involved a team of American filmmakers who had the misfortune of releasing a film about the Revolutionary War, in which they depicted British atrocities, just as the US entered World War I. Britain had become our new ally almost overnight, and in the midst of war fever, the filmmakers (several of whom were foreign-born) were convicted of treason and sent to jail. I wondered what would it be like to be called a traitor when you weren’t, to have your country turn against you for something you thought was patriotic. That led to the character of Claus Murphy, an exiled American filmmaker with Irish and German parents, who’s asked during the war to serve the very people who jailed and still suspect him.