Which is, actually, the experience of many “ordinary Germans.”

My mother died when I was fifteen, and after her death, I felt the need to learn more about her past and to explore the question of what it meant to be German. Her stories of growing up after the war had always served as a chastening counter to my own cushy American life. She walked five kilometers to school barefoot because she had no comfortable shoes; she removed the elastics from her underwear before she washed them so they would last longer; she saw her first orange in a Quaker care package.

During college, I spent a summer in Germany interviewing my grandmother, who was a remarkably open woman. Once I began asking questions, she wanted to talk about the war. Unlike many Germans her age, including my grandfather, she did not want to sweep what had happened under the carpet. As I knew her, she was not a racist or an anti-Semite. And she wanted to explain how she had been swept up in a movement that later became synonymous with evil. She did not want to be forgiven. She wanted to be understood. This is, I think, an important and often confused distinction. And in some ways, it formed the foundation of my novel.

My grandmother’s story was not my only source of inspiration, though. One of my mother’s best friends was the daughter of a man executed for his role in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The summer after my mother died, I accompanied this friend to her mother’s eightieth birthday party. It was a reunion of sorts for many widows and children of resisters, full of toasts and skits and reminiscing. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had a wholly different connection to their German past: their loved ones had been heroes rather than villains.

Unlike my grandmother, these widows of resisters stood on the right side of history. They were not riven by shame. But they too had lived two lives: the one before the war and the one after. I was, and still am, fascinated by this schism. I have known for my entire adult life that I wanted to write about it.

My grandfather died in 2009, and with him many secrets. He was a difficult and intimidating figure, whom I never felt comfortable questioning. When I did ask, he would answer with scornful evasions. Even before he died, I had begun researching the agricultural youth program he led as a young man, and reading memoirs of Wehrmacht soldiers. I also read my grandmother’s account of her life and the letters and memories of several widows of resisters. The time of World War II and its aftermath ran alongside my own, a current to dip into while sitting and nursing each of my three children or waiting for their swim lessons or reading myself to sleep at night.

And the women in the castle began to present themselves to me: a fierce widow of a resister who could talk Russian soldiers out of looting her home; a beautiful, backwater bride, disappointed by her marriage; an earnest, intense woman whose early embrace of Nazism was modeled on my grandmother’s.