In this novel, events evolve during the late 1930s at the time of president Kārlis Ulmanis’ authoritarian regime. This period in Latvia is often associated with images of a burgeoning economy, social stability, and the swelling of national pride; at the same time, these are the years when concepts such as “reduced value individuals” – individuals who are perceived to be a threat to the future happiness of the nation – were also disseminated. Popular in Europe, the concept of eugenics has also infiltrated Latvia, creating negative attitudes toward mental health patients. Magdalēna, the novel’s protagonist, has been raped and
is subsequently diagnosed as mentally ill in a psychiatric clinic. There, she meets Kārlis, a young, progressive psychiatrist whose views on the treatment of mental illness have been influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytical teachings.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

The novel is about women who are standing — some waiting for their date to arrive, some having just stood up after kneeling in prayer, and hundreds of them at the Ravensbrück concentration camp where they have been ordered to stand as punishment until the Nazi guards find Katrīna Vaica who has managed to break free for the second time. They have been standing there for three days already. One of them is about to die shortly.

The novel is in three parts: Violeta, Magdalēna and Duks. They are sent in different periods from 1941 till 2006. Each chapter is marked by a year. The plot unites all three main heroines of the novel, but the ties that connect their lives are revealed only at the very end.

The three main heroines of the novel:

Violeta is a prisoner at Ravensbrück, later working at a brothel in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Magdalēna is a woman living in Rūjiena, Soviet Latvia, she suffers from a psychological condition which is combined with high emotional intelligence. She deeply longs after an intimate relationship with a man.

Duks is a free-thinking young girl in the 1990s in Latvia who is experiencing first-hand the emotional weight of the changing times on people around her. She grows up to be a writer who has two daughters and ends up writing a novel about the holocaust.

The novel has other heroes and heroines: Lidija is a homosexual woman in Soviet Latvia who has just returned from her deportation to Siberia; Meibla, born to Violet while the latter was only partially conscious, clueless as to who her father is, is now a psychoanalyst and lives in America; Kārlis, who works as a personnel physician at the Ravensbrück concentration camp; Blondie, at first, hired as a carer of Kārlis' rich grandmother, and later, out of love for Kārlis, gets a job at the Ravensbrück concentration camp as a warden; Erlens, whose prototype is Irmfried Eberl, Commander of the Nazi death camp Treblinka; Ilze, who returns to Soviet Latvia after being imprisoned at the Kengir Gulag.

The novel’s conceptual layers address the objectification and “functionalization” of women in all three of these periods.

The novel touches on the testimonies of women who worked at the brothels of Nazi Germany frequented by the prisoners of the camps, of homosexual women in Soviet Latvia, of deported children who managed to return to Soviet Latvia, and people who survived the horrors of deportation and have never been able to return to normality, and of contemporary women who are witnessing the consequences in the reactions and emotional states of all these traumatised individuals who also happen to be their grandmothers, mothers, fathers and significant others.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv