Stella: A Novel

by Takis Würger

Overview

In this “spare, effecting novel,” a playboy in WWII Berlin discovers that the bliss of romance cannot shield him from the horrors of war (Publishers Weekly).

Friedrich, a wealthy but naïve young man, arrives in Berlin from Switzerland in 1942 with dreams of becoming an artist. He is hypnotized by Kristin, a beautiful artist’s model who teaches him how to navigate a bustling city filled with danger. Yet the horror of war feels far away as Friedrich and Kristin luxuriate in the Grand Hotel, where even Champagne and fresh fruit can be obtained thanks to the black market.

But the mood in the city darkens as the Nazi Party begins to terrorize anyone who might be disloyal to the Reich. And when Friedrich discovers that Kristin is not everything she seems, she tells him an astonishing secret: that her real name is Stella, and that she is Jewish, passing for Aryan.

As Friedrich confronts Stella’s unimaginable choices, he finds himself woefully unprepared for the history he is living through. Based in part on a real historical character, Stella sets a tortured love story against the backdrop of wartime Berlin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802149190
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/22/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	163
Sales rank:	869,340
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Takis Würger is a reporter working for the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Named one of Medium’s “Top 30 Journalists under 30,” alongside other accolades, Würger’s work as a journalist has taken him to Afghanistan, Libya, Mexico, and Ukraine. His first novel, The Club, won the lit.Cologne debut prize in Germany.

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of the New School for Social Research in New York City. She is the translator of the #1 international bestseller The Psychology of Stupidity, and has translated novels by Alexandre Dumas fils, Nataša Dragnić, Inès Cagnati, and Lorenza Pieri. She is the author of Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century. In 2017, she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France.

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic, writer, and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of the New School for Social Research in New York City. She has translated works by Alexandre Dumas fils, Nataša Dragnić, and Jean Echenoz, and is the author of Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century. In 2017 she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2021

Würger’s spare, affecting novel (after The Club) sets a coming-of-age story amid the deceptions and cruelty of Nazi-dominated Berlin. Friedrich grows up outside Geneva, son of an affluent textile importer and an alcoholic, anti-Semitic painter who hopes to nurture in her son the artistic greatness she never achieved. When Friedrich is eight, he suffers an injury in a snowball fight that robs him of color perception, disappointing his mother and sending him into despair. By the time Friedrich is 20, in 1942, he’s developed a romantic idea of Berlin from literature and newsreels, and travels there despite the raging war, believing “a little bit of strength could pass to me.” There, he falls in love with beautiful artists’ model Kristin, who doesn’t allow him to see her home or meet her family. After Kristin is raped, beaten, and shaved, she admits to Friedrich she is a Jew named Stella Goldschlag (a historical figure subsequently known for collaborating with the Gestapo). Stella tells Friedrich she can save her parents by locating a Jewish document forger, but Friedrich worries she is still not telling him the truth. While the novel’s ending doesn’t feel fully resolved, Würger skillfully intertwines fact and fiction. This subtle, thought-provoking narrative is worth a look. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Stella:

“A feckless dilettante, Friedrich arrives in Berlin on the day after New Year’s 1942. ‘I was a young man with money and a Swiss passport,’ he tells us in Liesl Schillinger’s elegant translation, ‘who had thought he could live in the middle of this war without having anything to do with it’ . . . For a time, that might even seem possible . . . [but] very soon his acquaintance with an S.S. officer named Tristan, and his romance with Tristan’s impulsive, elusive friend, the Stella of the novel’s title, will inspire a different kind of search. What is the connection between this young woman and Tristan? Why is she so troubled? Can Friedrich believe anything she tells him?”—Alida Becker, New York Times Book Review

“There is something of a Candide about the young hero, as he wanders guilelessly around Berlin, avoiding air raids, spending money on treats and excursions for the girl he has fallen for. But Stella is also a coming-of-age novel, and in this case adulthood brings not only an understanding of terrible events but also of the duplicity of strangers . . . An elegant novel . . . Liesl Schillinger’s thoughtful translation from the German original of 2019 perfectly conveys the sense of menace that hangs over it.”—Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement

“Told in sparse, tight prose . . . An unsettling, atmospheric read.”—Antonia Senior, Times (UK)

“Serves as a reminder of the depths of depravity and evil of the Holocaust.”—Gordon Arnold,Winnipeg Free Press

“Spare, affecting . . . Würger skillfully intertwines fact and fiction . . . Subtle, thought-provoking.”—Publishers Weekly

“A powerful, visceral portrait of individuals caught up in a pivotal year during Nazi rule.”—Booklist

“Takis Würger is someone out of the ordinary and this book is like him: powerful, strong, painful. Stella is a book from which we do not emerge unscathed and in which he explores the depths of the human soul. I stayed in this book for a long time after turning the final page. Würger is surely one of the most important writers of our generation.”—Joël Dicker, New York Times-bestselling author of The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

“With its deceptively simple yet quietly elegant style, Stella takes us into a world which we assume perhaps that we know, the Berlin of the war years. To our surprise, however, we discover that we do not know it at all. Here is a love story set among jazz clubs and artist studios yet inevitably enacted in the shadow of the Gestapo. It’s a story which shows us something new about a nightmare which is always in danger of seeming too familiar.”—Lawrence Osborne, author of The Glass Kingdom

“I was somewhat skeptical when I began this book, but it gripped and surprised me, and by the end I was full of admiration.”—Daniel Kehlmann, International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Tyll

“For those who wish to find in history a key to our absolutist present.”—Il Giornale (Italy)

“Stella is a book you can hardly put down. You will read it in just a few hours, whatever you might have planned . . . It has a style which in a certain way echoes Hemingway’s war reporting—you might call it ‘melancholy heroism.’ But it reads very well, you can’t say otherwise.”—Die Welt (Germany)

“Würger writes in a quiet, authentic style; he writes without mercy but never without empathy, never in a way that is contrived or lurid.”—Jüdische Allgemeine (Germany)

“Würger avoids any hint of pathos, writing instead in clearly chiseled, artfully sparse sentences . . . It is the escalating state of emergency that explains everything in this slimmed down, concise novel.”—Abendzeitung München (Germany)

“Stella shows how war and love sometimes bring up the worst in a human being, and how much pain love can cause.”—Metro (Netherlands)

Praise for The Club:

“The gritty subject matter is juxtaposed against a prose style we tend to associate with a different kind of novel—it reads more like a coming-of-age story than a thriller. Würger’s writing is mannered; it often has an otherworldly, fable-like quality.”—Adelle Waldman, New York Times Book Review

“Würger’s debut was a bestseller in his native Germany. Its universal themes, brilliantly depicted world and taut storytelling constitute a recipe for further success . . . The Club starts out as a poignant coming-of-age tale and then morphs into an intelligent, fast-paced thriller that scrutinizes class divides and gender imbalance . . . Würger serves up visceral thrills with boxing bouts. But he delivers real knockout blows as Hans goes deeper undercover and learns ‘what humans are at heart: predators.’”—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A timely, beautifully paced novel about class and prestige in the #MeToo era . . . In a campus novel that echoes the detective structure of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Würger cycles between each character’s voice to brilliantly evoke the medieval unreality of Cambridge and the almost comical wealth of the students. There is much to dissect in this concise and dramatic tale.”—Booklist

“A young man infiltrates a secret university club and discovers a dangerous secret . . . The club is full of rich, privileged young men well-versed in secrets, debauchery, and something far more sinister . . . The novel’s complicated ending touches on the problem of justice and redemption: who gets it, who deserves it, and its human cost. A sparse, cutting debut in which violence begets violence begets healing.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Distinguished German journalist Würger, who broke some bones boxing for a year at Cambridge, offers a powerful and provoking story.”—Library Journal

“A cunning, sinuous tale, Takis Würger’s The Club is so wildly entertaining that, at first, it’s easy to miss its deeper mysteries. But, as it unfolds, brutal truths about class and gender and violence emerge, take hold and shudder through the novel’s final pages.”—Megan Abbott, best-selling author of Give Me Your Hand and You Will Know Me

“The Club, Takis Würger’s exquisite debut, is a novel as rare as a phoenix, a story both beautifully told and white-knuckle thrilling. A tale of pain, privilege and revenge, The Club reads like something both mythical and modern, a fable whose pages demand to be turned.”—Christopher J. Yates, author of Black Chalk and Grist Mill Road

From the Publisher

08/01/2020

A celebrated German journalist whose first novel, The Club, was a big hit in Europe and got respectable attention here, Würger returns with the story of naïve young Friedrich, whose ambition to study art takes him from Switzerland to Berlin in 1942 (what was he thinking?). He falls for beautiful life model Kristin, who arrives at his room one night, bloodied and crying, to confess that she is actually Stella—a Jew passing as Aryan. And she has some troubling links to the Gestapo.

Library Journal

2020-10-27
Love blooms in World War II–era Berlin in this fact-based historical novel.

When dreamy and artistic Friedrich is old enough to leave his cloistered home of Choulex, a small villa near Geneva, to travel the world, his merchant father suggests Tehran: Why not avoid the war in Europe? But Friedrich, compelled by the stories he’s heard “about secret nightclubs in Berlin, about hustlers, cocaine, an ivory fountain in a grand hotel,” as well as the disappearance of Jews, instead chooses to dive directly into the heart of Nazi Germany in 1942. Determined to find out the truth about the Nazi regime, Friedrich is quickly caught up in a whirlwind romance with nightclub singer Stella Goldschlag, who is hiding her Jewish identity. In order to protect her parents, who have been imprisoned, Stella agrees to inform on other Jews for the Gestapo, leaving Friedrich torn between his own moral code and the intensity of first love. This second novel from Würger, a journalist at Der Spiegel, blends fact and fiction, incorporating excerpts from witness statements documented at a postwar trial of the real-life Stella Goldschlag, who continued to inform for the Gestapo throughout the war. Würger’s commitment to the historical reality of the Nazi regime is commendable, and he doesn't shy away from depicting the gruesome horrors it inflicted on Jews in Berlin in the early 1940s. But passages giving historical context for the events of the novel grow tedious, and the excerpted documents can feel extraneous. Conversely, his decision to tell the true story of Stella Goldschlag, a fascinating and terrifying woman, through the lovestruck eyes of a bland and entirely fictional male character is frustrating.

A well-intentioned and thoroughly researched novel that works better in theory than in practice.

Kirkus Reviews