Exiting the theater, two girls walked in front of Marianne. Young women, really, maybe sixteen and seventeen. As they jostled through the doors in the midst of the solemn crowd, Marianne overheard them talking about silk stockings—one of them had ruined her last pair. Now where would she ever get new ones? She pouted. “Not from the Jews,” the other said, and they both giggled.

“For shame,” Marianne spat. “Have you become such monsters that you can laugh at that?” The girls stared at her, not with shame or anger but with fear. And all around her Marianne felt the people draw close together, tightening their scarves and jackets, squaring their shoulders, fortifying themselves against her reproach.

A rumor had developed in Ehrenheim and elsewhere that the film was a piece of Allied propaganda and that the footage really showed German soldiers and collaborators killed and starved in Soviet gulags. In the last months of the war, the Americans had dropped leaflets with photos of concentration camp victims from airplanes and this was how Hitler had explained them. Being the sheep they were, the Ehrenheimers believed him. And they clung to this idea now—a thin protection between them and their own complicity.

It made Marianne livid with fury and shame.

Unlike Marianne, Benita did not go see the film. And she stopped listening to the news broadcasts with the von Lingenfelses.

“Ugh,” she said with a shudder on the third night when she joined them sitting around the radio. The subject was the liberation of Mauthausen, another concentration camp. “Do you really think the children should hear this?” Benita asked.

Marianne turned and stared at her. “Of course they should. They are Germans.”

The children fidgeted in their seats. Even Elisabeth knew better than to interject.

Cowed, Benita returned to her darning and listened to the rest of the broadcast in silence.

But the following night she begged off. She was too tired to listen and was going to bed. Marianne bit her tongue. Where was Benita’s sense of moral responsibility? Where was her compassion? She seemed to have no feeling of commitment to—or belonging in—the wider world. She was as bad as the citizens of Ehrenheim. Marianne’s anger rose as suddenly as a flock of startled birds. Connie had loved Benita, she reminded herself. She was the mother of Connie’s son. This was what mattered.

But it was so difficult not to judge! Some deep seed in Marianne’s being grew unstoppably toward fairness, pushing blindly through nuance and complication to extract a simple answer: wrong or right.

As a girl, roaming the Ostsee with Connie and Freddy and the other children of the Prussian aristocracy, she had been christened “The Judge.” In the anarchic atmosphere of the summer holidays, the children had turned to Marianne to sort out their quarrels and issues of fairness. She had loved the role. It made her feel distinguished and powerful. And it was because of this privileged place she held that she and Connie grew close. He was a leader of the group too, an inventor of the best games and most exciting adventures, a charismatic Pied Piper to the children of the Grand Hotel. In the absence of nannies and governesses, who were instructed by their parent overlords to let children return to nature on these holidays, Connie and Marianne reigned together—king and queen of the wild things—Connie full of mischief, and Marianne (at fourteen) full of wisdom.