5. What drew Benita to Connie? Did she love him? What were her true feelings for Herr Muller? Why was Marianne so opposed to their union? Why didn’t Herr Muller defy Marianne and marry Benita?

6. How did Benita’s beauty both help and hurt her? How did reading Connie’s final letter influence the tragic choice she makes? Why did Benita feel that love, for her generation, was dead?

7. Think about Ania. Was she like most ordinary Germans of the period? How did she hide her past from Marianne and Benita? How did the revelation about her past affect her relationship with Marianne? Do you think Ania was ashamed of the choices she made?

8. At the end of the war, each woman was in a different place, physically and emotionally. What ordeals did these widows face? What choices were they forced to make to survive? How did the years of fighting—and their nation’s defeat—change daily life for Germans like Marianne, Benita, Ania, and their children?

9. Where did fate eventually lead these three women? What about their children? How did the secrets these women carried haunt their lives?

10. The Women in the Castle offers a different look at World War II as it explores the lives of ordinary Germans. How does Jessica Shattuck’s novel challenge our perceptions and notions of Germans during and after the war? Were women like Marianne, Benita, and Ania victims in their own way? How responsible are individuals for their leaders? What about resisters like Marianne and her circle? Why do you think she saw the true monster that Hitler was when many others did not?

11. What insights does The Women in the Castle hold for our own time?

Read On

Author’s Note

I originally wrote the chapter that follows to flesh out how Ania Brandt became Ania Grabarek. It was a challenge to figure out how she would have ended up with her friend’s papers, since I knew she would never have stolen them, so the real Ania Grabarek had to die, but how? Perhaps she could gift her papers to her friend on her deathbed? If not, how would Ania think to take them in her grief? These are the kinds of puzzles novelists are sometimes forced to solve.

When I came across a reference to the many refugees who died in the bombing of Dresden, I knew I had found my answer. In the chaos and horror of the moment, Ania Grabarek and her son could perish, while Ania Brandt and her boys could survive. But what about the papers? How could they remain intact? My research guided me through various horrific but plausible possibilities.

However, the more I read about the bombing, the more awful the task I had set for myself became. The accounts I read were so ghastly and tragic that I found it difficult to sit down and inhabit such moments. And anyway, what could I possibly contribute to the vivid stories already told by those who were there—to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, or Victor Klemperer’s diary?