'Caging Skies' by Christine Leunens

‘Caging Skies’ by Christine Leunens is the book the movie ‘Jojo Rabbit’ is based on. The movie which won several Oscars, was released in 2019. Much to my surprise, I loved it. Its portrayal of the ethical and moral dilemma of a young boy and his family of life during the Nazi heydays was revealing; hilarious and entertaining.

At the time I only read the opening lines of Christine Leunens ‘Caging Skies’:

‘The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.’

A strong opening at a time when words like ‘fake news’ had become part of our daily vocabulary.

It took me another two years to read the book in its entirety. How vastly different it is to the movie: only the opening chapters describe the life of the Betzler family in its entirety. I remember a movie scene: the young boys are given baby rabbits, their little noses twitching, and told to kill them with their bare hands. A funny yet heart breaking scene. The words are heartbreakingly horrible in the book:

‘Ideally, a leader told us, we should be able to hit a baby’s head against a wall and not feel anything. Feelings were mankind’s most dangerous enemy. They above all were what must be killed if we were to make ourselves a better people.‘

The two best friends look at each other and admit that they are bad people because they’d be unable to kill each other if the Fuehrer told them to.

This first part of the book I read within a sitting. I was fascinated by the powerful portrayal of the parents’, any parent’s dilemma: Hitler Youth and its group for younger kids were compulsory, keeping the kids out of those youth groups was not an option. How do you survive as a morally sound person, who did succumb to the perverse mindset of Jews being sub-human? That killing sub-perfect people is only in the best interest of society?

 ‘Hitler brings war into every family.’

A stark sentence. The parents hide a Jewish girl, the young boy, indoctrinated by the Nazi ideology, finds out. What ensues is stark, powerful, a fascinating read.

The second part of the book takes life through war years into the late 1940s and beyond the war. It portrays the relationship between Johannes and Elsa, the Jewish girl, then woman. Hidden during the war and cared for first by Johannes’ parents, later by him. The obsessive, manipulative, destructive relationship between those two damaged and isolated people is an arduous read. Johannes’ is obsessed, he loves Elsa – is his controlling, imprisoning manipulation that, in the end, destroys them both, ‘love’? This second part of the story is a powerful portrayal: young people raised with the understanding that feelings are the enemy become incapable of creating a caring and supportive love relationship.