Opening in Berlin just as Hitler’s rise has begun, art historian Rebecca Birrell’s first novel follows Hannah Sherman who turns her back on her family, determined to become an artist rather than marry into a life of domestic drudgery.
Using her seamstress skills to pay her rent, Hannah establishes a life for herself: mornings sketching at the museum; an hour in Saul’s bed; nights with Maria visiting Berlin’s clubs leading to an affair with Charlotte, a brilliant dancer. Meanwhile, the papers are filled with praise for the politician Germany is convinced will lift it from its humiliation. Anti-Semitism, once covert, becomes increasingly open. As Hannah falls under her patron Elke’s spell, she’s asked to practice an uncomfortable deception and discovers her work’s being used in ways she would never have countenanced. By 1933, Hitler is chancellor: Hannah, Saul and Charlotte watch events unfold over the following years with dread.
Full of evocative descriptions, Birrell’s debut is a gorgeous, immersive novel which wears its meticulous research lightly. Hannah is an engaging narrator, passionate, intelligent and vibrant; easy prey for Elke’s flattering attentions, blinded by desire for this beautiful, sophisticated woman. Birrell’s principal characters are beautifully realised, the increasing horror of their situation summoned up by small details, their reluctance to tear themselves away from their friends, family and homeland entirely believable. This is a period and place often written about in fiction, but Birrell’s powerful yet understated writing feels fresh, bringing it vividly to life.

Venus, Vanishing offers readers a view into an aspect of Nazi propaganda, in the years leading up to the second world war, that I knew very little about. It specifically explores the theft of art created by Jewish women and its subsequent modification into German nationalist pieces that could be used as propaganda to promote the ideals of the Nazi state. The original artists not only had their work stolen and modified into pieces that promoted the extinguishing of their race, but they were also erased as artists, with the creation of these works then being attributed to German men, who didn’t even exist.

‘Most work by artists murdered by the regime was lost or destroyed, with a small fraction entering museum stores and private collections, hidden from public view.’

Through Hannah’s emancipation from her family, Rebecca Birrell creates this world in which Jewish artists, performers, and academics all intermingled in a bohemian lifestyle of creative expression and free love. She writes about desire and longing, intimacy and love, with such a beautiful fluency. Likewise, she conveys the dread and fear, as life began to change, and the Nazi regime asserted itself and made its intentions clear and all encompassing.

‘I was afraid, and my fear had become buoyant and persistent, it no longer subsided with sleep or reassurance as it had before.’

Theft and erasure are the key themes of this novel, and it explores them deeply and with great emotion. In the author note at the end, Rebecca Birrell expressed that she had ‘hoped to write a novel primarily about Jewish life, not Jewish death’, and I think she has achieved that. This novel serves as a counter-narrative to what is usually represented in contemporarily written historical fiction. It’s a beautifully written story, recommended to fans of literary history fiction and lovers of art history.