On Complicity, Forgetting, and the Bureaucracy of Cruelty in Angharad Hampshire’s The Mare
“I only did what everyone else did back then,” Hermine says, voice breaking as she clutches her apron in suburban Queens. She says it to her husband, to the reporter at the door, and, by implication, to us. It is a line that could be, and has been, spoken by prison guards, immigration agents, drone operators, and border patrols. In The Mare, Angharad Hampshire does not offer a redemption arc. Instead, she offers something far more disquieting: an ordinary woman who lives a long, largely unremarkable life after working at one of the Nazi death camps.
Set between pre-war Austria, Nazi Germany, and postwar America, the novel is a fictionalised but closely researched account of Hermine Braunsteiner, the real-life Majdanek camp guard later extradited from Queens, New York. The first Nazi war criminal to be deported from the United States. But Hampshire’s Hermine is not a monster. She’s a girl who loved birds, mourned her father, and once dreamed of becoming a nurse. The narrative oscillates between her chapters and those of Russell, the American engineer who marries her in the 1950s. Their life together in Queens is warm, modest, and built on a lie. The book’s central drama begins not with a gunshot or a confession, but a knock at the door, an NYT reporter unravelling the past. “Everything around me started to wobble and bend,” Russell reflects. “All that was solid became molten.”
Banality
There are no flashbacks to the worst of Majdanek. No graphic scenes. No overt exposition. Hampshire is interested not in atrocity as spectacle but atrocity as habit, routine, and job. She draws heavily on Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men1 and Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, both cited in the front, and both deeply concerned with how state violence is operationalised by people who do not see themselves as violent. Hermine’s early chapters follow her as a maid, a scullery worker, a homesick daughter. The slide into SS employment is not explained in ideological terms. It is narrated, devastatingly, as labour history: one job pays more than another. One job comes with a uniform. One job becomes survival.
At its best, the novel echoes If This Is a Man by Primo Levi, not in scope but in moral ambition. Hampshire forces the reader to confront what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” a phrase overused but still apt. Hermine is banal. Not unfeeling, not brainwashed, but unexceptional. She cleans. She cooks. She lies. Her past is metabolised into a domestic American present where her husband tests televisions and she paints the hallway pale yellow. Hampshire’s prose is unflashy but emotionally precise. The most brutal revelations come not in the form of action but silence: things not said, memories cut short.
The novel’s political power lies in its resonance with the present. While Hampshire never names ICE or Guantánamo, readers are unlikely to miss the contemporary parallels. “I just did my job” is not a line buried in 1942. It’s been spoken by officers dragging children from classrooms, by agents at America’s southern border, by men and women working in privately contracted detention centres. It is the same defence. The same lie. What Hampshire asks, quietly, but persistently, is how these people live with themselves. How they sleep. How they love.
Reckoning
This is where The Mare succeeds and fails, depending on your expectations. It is not a comprehensive historical fiction about the Holocaust. We are not given access to the machinery of genocide. The victims remain unnamed, unvoiced. Some might argue this is a dangerous omission, that without counterbalance the book risks humanising the perpetrator too completely. But that criticism misses the point. The Mare is not about sympathy. It is about discomfort. It asks the reader to sit in a kitchen in Queens and realise that genocide is not committed by madmen. It is maintained by women in aprons, listening to the Beach Boys, brushing paint off their trousers.
Russell, Hermine’s husband, is the novel’s emotional axis. A decent man in every conventional sense, soft-spoken, musically inclined, quietly patriotic, he falls in love with Hermine’s mystery. He brings her to New York, marries her in Canada, and believes, until it is too late, that the past can be left behind. His journey is one of slow horror. The reader knows more than he does, and Hampshire uses this disjuncture to full effect. His love, his protectiveness, his optimism are all grounded in falsehood. By the time he knows the truth, his life is already built on it. He is not merely deceived. He is implicated, like so many who do not ask the right questions until history knocks. His story mirrors the American postwar fantasy. One where the past could be reset with a visa, a new dress, a bird book by the lake.
If there is something missing from the novel, it is a deeper excavation of legal process. The newspaper investigation drives the plot forward, but the broader system that enabled Nazi collaborators to emigrate, to work, to marry, is largely off-page. Operation Paperclip is not mentioned. Nor is the Office of Special Investigations, the late but vital US effort to root out such figures. Hampshire is more interested in individual psychology than institutional history, and while this allows her to avoid didacticism, it also leaves gaps.
Still, The Mare lingers. It lingers in its quietness, its ordinariness, its refusal to resolve. The final chapters offer no catharsis. There is no courtroom, no grand confession, no moral reckoning. Just a man who no longer knows his wife, and a woman who is afraid of being remembered. The book ends, appropriately, with silence.
Yet it is not just a historical novel. It is a warning. The US now governed by a regime that has revived the old. ICE agents in combat gear turn up to homes without warrants, refuse to identify themselves, abduct children on the walk home from school, detain the undocumented in secret locations, and say—when they say anything at all—that they are only doing their jobs. The agents who don masks and badges without names, who follow executive orders from Trump’s second term that explicitly target the vulnerable, who silence their own doubts in exchange for salary and status. They are not morally neutral. They are not passive functionaries. They are the modern iteration of fascism. History will not be kind to them.
“That was a completely crazy idea… Just forget I said that.”
Footnotes
- Ordinary Men is Christopher R. Browning’s landmark study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of middle-aged German men. Mostly working-class and non-ideological, who became perpetrators of mass murder during the Holocaust. The book argues that ordinary individuals, not ideological fanatics, carried out genocidal violence through peer pressure, obedience to authority, and gradual moral numbing. ↩︎
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