New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Erika Quinn, "This Horrible Uncertainty: A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

·35 min·2 clips

In December 1943, Vera Conrad learned her husband was missing, not dead and not alive.

1. New Books in Military History features Erika Quinn and her book This Horrible Uncertainty: A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948. 2. Deepa Charya interviews Erika Quinn, who uses Vera Conrad’s diary and personal papers from the Walter Kempowski archive to reconstruct a German woman’s wartime life. 3. The episode asks how a farm wife in rural Germany lived from 1939 to 1948 after her husband Joachim went missing on the Eastern Front in December 1943. 4. Quinn explains that she first searched Berlin archives for firsthand accounts of war widowhood, bereavement, and grief, then found Conrad’s diary among Kempowski materials. 5. The diary began as a baby book and later became a war chronicle, which Quinn says made the source startling in its material and emotional contrast. 6. Quinn connects the diary’s form to Conrad’s attempt to record growth, goodness, and wartime optimism even as events turned catastrophic. 7. The conversation returns repeatedly to subjectivity, with Charya asking how Quinn moved from writing on 19th-century elites to studying an ordinary German woman. 8. Quinn says she is interested in interiority and in how subjectivity changes in relation to larger ideological structures. 9. Charya and Quinn discuss ambiguous loss, and Quinn defines trauma as a break or hole in the narrative. 10. Quinn describes missing persons as producing an “infinite realm of possibility” because the facts are absent. 11. She says grief under ambiguous loss disrupts the normal oscillation between planning for the future and mourning the past. 12. Quinn argues that surviving such a loss can require creating a narrative that may not be factually accurate but is emotionally livable. 13. Quinn says her method combines history of emotions with current brain science, while remaining aware that Conrad never used the word trauma. 14. She notes that some historians may view that framework as anachronistic, and she says she tried to “wear the science fairly lightly.” 15. The interview also focuses on Conrad’s diary as an active tool, not a passive record, because she writes to her absent husband and shapes her own self-presentation. 16. Quinn calls this a feedback loop in which repeated emotional tones and perspectives become more fixed through reference back to earlier entries. 17. Charya presses Quinn on National Socialism’s emotional demands, and Quinn cites the pairing of fanaticism with stoicism in Nazi emotional culture. 18. Quinn says Vera Conrad had to reconcile a victorious-war ideology with a missing husband, Lutheran stoicism, and the impossibility of vulnerability in a Nazi emotional imaginary. 19. The episode’s style is an extended scholarly conversation, with Charya asking dense methodological questions and Quinn answering in reflective, measured detail. 20. Historians of emotions, wartime diaries, and German social history will get the most from this episode, while listeners wanting a light overview of World War II may skip it.

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