![]() There are only ruins because at the end of 1944, the Nazis blew them up before leaving while the Red Army was advancing. I visited Parcz, called Gross-Partsch during World War II, the village where Margot Wölk lived with her parents-in-law, and I visited the Wolf's Lair with a guide who escorted me through the ruins of Hitler's, Goebbels', Goering's and others' bunkers. Did you travel to the site during your research? ![]() The novel is set partly in Berlin, but mostly in the area of Prussia where Hitler had his retreat, the Wolfsschanze. It's an era we'll continue to investigate for a long time because we'll probably never have definitive answers about it, but I believe these kinds of questions concern everyone in every era, including our present time. The Third Reich is a group that makes these questions more important and evident. ![]() I always wonder what people are prepared to do to survive. Through the narrative, I wanted to analyze totalitarian organizations' effects on people who aren't fanatics. In extreme conditions we can become guilty, we can collude with evil without choosing to, but in certain eras, not choosing is choosing. However, above all I wanted to look into human ambivalence. It was interesting to see war from the point of view of marginal people-especially women, who stayed at home but became soldiers in an unusual army and risked their lives for the Third Reich, just like their husbands, brothers and fiancés fighting on the front. Did you want to capture a different angle on the war and its effect on ordinary German citizens? There are many novels about World War II and life under the Nazi regime, but this is a rather unusual story. My question was: What would I have done if I had been in her shoes? However, her story had already become my obsession and I thought that the only way to understand why it obsessed me was to write a novel loosely based on Frau Wölk's experience. I searched for her address, but when I found it three months later and wrote her a letter to ask if we could meet, she had just died. That's why I was struck by her story and decided to meet her. I felt that this contradiction represented the contradiction of her role: she was a victim being forced to risk life and limb three times a day just by eating, but she was also guilty, because she was working for Hitler, an inhuman, evil person. She described the tasters' meals as very distressing moments, as a real nightmare, but she also remembered how delicious and fresh the food was. Wölk and other young women were recruited to taste Hitler's food and check whether it was poisoned. Her husband was fighting on the Russian front, and her in-laws lived in a country village very close to the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters hidden in the forest. In the interview, she said she had never been a Nazi, but had been forced by the SS to become a food taster because she had moved to her parents-in-law's house when a bomb destroyed her apartment in Berlin, where she was born. She was 96 years old and it was the first time she had confessed her experience she had kept it a secret her whole life. In September 2014, while reading an Italian newspaper, I found a brief article about Margot Wölk, Hitler's last living food taster. Tell us about the inspiration for At the Wolf's Table. It is her fourth novel and the first one translated into English. Italian author Rosella Postorino talks about At the Wolf's Table, inspired by one of Hitler's real-life food tasters. ![]()
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