In the shadows of Nazi viciousness, an unlikely story of love and heroism blooms

By Julia M. Klein
November 15, 2024

The Sunflower House
By Adriana Allegri
St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages, $29

Even as the Third Reich insisted on the need for more Lebensraum — living space — for the German people, the regime vigorously sought to expand its population. The SS-run Lebensborn program honored mothers who birthed large families, established shelters for pregnant women (many unmarried), and promoted the adoption of “Aryan” children by Nazi couples.

Lebensborn policies, with all their sinister racist and authoritarian undertones, provide the backdrop for Adriana Allegri’s propulsively readable debut novel, The Sunflower House. The book combines historical fiction with the tropes of romance, complete with breathy, erotic prose. Its characters run the gamut from grotesquely evil to self-sacrificingly heroic, though their true nature isn’t always immediately apparent. In this dystopian world, love, though powerful, can’t quite conquer all.

The novel begins in New Jersey, in 2006, when a daughter discovers a box marked with a swastika and containing the secrets of her mother, Allina. The narrative then flashes back to 1930s and ’40s Germany, where the story is told in the third person from the alternating perspectives of Allina and two other characters. (This doesn’t make much narrative sense, since the frame is Allina recounting her past to her daughter, Katrine.)

The primary setting is the Hochland Home, a fictional version of an actual Lebensborn institution that opened near Munich in 1936. It is a complicated place, embodying both ostentatious luxury and deprivation, danger and rescue. Here unwed mothers, among them teenagers, seek refuge. Here, too, in Allegri’s telling, SS men congregate to romance and impregnate women eager to bear children for the Reich. And here, too often, their children languish rather than thrive, victims of a disciplinary regime that prioritizes silence and order over affection.

In an author’s note, Allegri concedes that the precise contours of the Lebensborn program are contested. But she rejects the idea that institutions such as Hochland Home were chiefly sites of involuntary confinement and rape. Her fictional home is more like an SS harem, with enthusiastic participants of both sexes. While the homes “began as havens for unwed mothers,” Allegri writes, they also accepted “very willing,” ideologically motivated women who “produced multiple children, often with different fathers and in rapid succession.”

The majority of surviving Lebensborn children “were given to Nazi families to raise,” Allegri writes. Other children were kidnapped from families in German-occupied countries — a crime Allegri references in her author’s note, but not in the novel itself.

The protagonist of The Sunflower House, Allina, is a Mischling, with maternal Jewish ancestry and false papers. (She goes by a variety of surnames in the course of the novel.)  Having lost her parents in infancy, Allina has been lovingly raised by her aunt and uncle in the small, fictional village of Badensburg. Her uncle dies of cancer; her fiancé moves to Berlin; and her aunt is killed in a Nazi massacre provoked by the village’s resistance activities. Allina survives but is raped by a vicious SS officer, a patron of Hochland Home. He transports her there and awaits word of a pregnancy that, to Allina’s relief, never materializes.

With nowhere else to go and her true identity a secret, Allina stays on at Hochland, working in the front office and then the nursery. There she meets Karl von Strassberg, a handsome SS officer with a few secrets of his own.

Here are Allina’s first impressions of Karl: “He had an arrogant face, with a square jaw, a straight, high-bridged nose, and sharp cheekbones. His gaze was dark and penetrating. In the light she couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, but she couldn’t look away.” Despite her initial trepidation, the relationship inevitably grows. At one point, “her awareness of him [was] like electrical currents against her skin.” At another, “[t]he heat from his body and scent of him, cool and clean, made her stomach tighten…His gaze wouldn’t let hers go.”

Allina learns that Karl, in defiance of the SS’s mission, is devoting his off hours to helping Jewish children escape. She soon joins him in a project to improve the health of the developmentally impaired toddlers at Hochland Home. That will entail trips to his Munich home, the titular Sunflower House, and jumpstart their burgeoning romance. Though the two will eventually marry, a happy ending eludes them.

Was von Strassberg that semi-mythical creature, a ‘good’ Nazi? Katrine at first suggests there is “no such thing,” and indicts him for hiding “behind his uniform” and being “part of the machine.” But that formulation turns out to be unduly harsh. Karl is, in fact, a resistance hero, and it’s a blessing that Allina is able to tell his story, as well as her own, before she dies.

The book’s denouement is at once sad and triumphant, a brief in favor of illuminating even the darkest of historical corners. “Secrets kept us apart for decades,” Katrine reflects about her mother. “Truth brought us back together in the space of a day.”

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