Children of no Man's Land

Children of no Man's Land by G.B. Stern

Children of No Man’s Land begins with Deborah “Deb” Marcus and her fifteen-year-old brother Richard visiting the Kochs in Dorzheim, a German town where their hosts’ social life is governed by status, family feuds, religious divisions and strict conventions. Richard dislikes his earnest, sentimental contemporary Lothar von Relling, who is already betrothed to Frieda-Marie Hauffe but becomes romantically obsessed with Deb. Deb, restless, independent and hungry for a great consuming love, finds herself trapped in Marianna Koch’s malicious domestic manoeuvres when Felix Koch kisses her after his wife leaves them alone together. She escapes further danger by pretending to sleep and asks Richard not to leave her alone with Felix. Lothar later meets Deb in the woods and receives from her a brief kiss, which she sees as a generous gift of “magic” to someone who values it more than she does. Dorzheim treats the incident as a grave scandal and as an insult to Frieda-Marie. Lothar is punished and sent away, while Deb becomes the target of gossip. Defiantly, she cultivates her notoriety, shocks local propriety, invents a dowry that brings proposals from three men, and visits Felix’s estranged brother Sigismund Koch, whom she likes. Yet labour unrest, secret preparations and ominous unlit trains make the town increasingly threatening. When war begins to spread, Deb and Richard realize they are stranded in Germany and urgently need to return to England. Back in England, Richard’s patriotism deepens. He longs to fight, regarding war as the clear, collective purpose his nature requires. His father Ferdinand, a German-born Jew who chose England as his home, is nevertheless driven from his Stock Exchange partnership by suspicion and insult. The family leaves Daisybanks for Montagu Hall, a boarding-house. Ferdinand and his sister Stella have raised Deb and Richard in deliberate reaction against the despotism of old Hermann Marcus: they have wanted their children to be free, trusted and able to choose for themselves. Their generosity, however, gives Deb little external protection against her own impulses. At Montagu Hall, Deb forms “the Chorus” with Jenny Carew and Major Burton Ames around Cora, an oil-stove in Deb’s room. Jenny is warm, impulsive, physically affectionate and burdened by illness, poverty, marriage and an unhappy attachment to Ames. Ames, an exhausted professional soldier suffering from shell-shock and neurasthenia, is cynical, solitary and still devoted to the wife who has separated from him after his earlier unfaithfulness. Deb falls in love with him despite knowing he is married and unlikely to return her feeling. The three create an intimate refuge of jokes, food, talk and shared confinement, while Deb envies Jenny’s easy physical tenderness and struggles between desire, pride and self-restraint. One evening, Jenny and Deb plot to escape a party and draw Ames back to Cora. Jenny feigns illness, then becomes genuinely unwell. Deb, determined to break through Ames’s guardedness, tries to kiss him, but he is interrupted before he responds. A telephone call brings news that his wife wants him back and has taken a house in London. Ames leaves in exhilaration, gratefully kissing both women goodbye. In the darkness after Cora’s flame dies, Deb seeks comfort from Jenny and discovers that Jenny’s heart has stopped. Jenny’s death breaks up the Chorus: Dolph takes Bobby away, La llorraine and Manon depart, Ames disappears into his restored marriage, and Deb’s room is abandoned. Deb later befriends Antonia Verity, an artist whose reserve and instinctive chastity embody the self-possession Deb longs for. Antonia criticizes Deb’s tendency to let men take emotional and physical liberties, not from conventional prudery but from belief in pride and self-respect. Deb recognizes that her permissive upbringing has left her to define her own boundaries. She fears that life may become a chain of disconnected episodes—Daisybanks, Dorzheim, the Chorus—each vanishing once its people and setting are gone. Richard’s crisis becomes more severe after anti-German violence follows the sinking of the Lusitania. Swept into a mob attacking Gottlieb Schnabel’s bakery, he expects enemy brutes but finds only Schnabel and his terrified family. The sight destroys his appetite for vengeance, though he cannot resolve the contradiction between German guilt and the innocent German before him. Soon Ferdinand reveals that Richard was born in Germany, before Ferdinand’s naturalization, and remains legally German. He may face restrictions or internment and cannot enlist for England. Richard feels betrayed by the parents whose devotion to freedom left him without a settled nationality. He begins to understand himself as stranded in a moral and national “No Man’s Land,” divided between birth, inheritance, loyalty, hatred and belonging. The fragment ends as Richard confides in David Rothenburg, whose family has changed its name to Redbury and nervously performs English patriotism while relatives and family members are interned on opposite sides. David, unlike Richard, remembers Germany with affection but feels compelled to enlist because his family cannot bear further suspicion.

By G.B. Stern · First published 1915 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Social Realism · 25 chapters · 156,624 words

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"Let her go," said Ferdinand Marcus. "I want my daughter to have a good time."

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British fiction · early twentieth century · World War I · war aftermath · children · family drama · social realism · psychological fiction · coming of age · domestic life · social class · displacement

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