review
The star of Anja Kampmann’s third novel is Hedda, an aerial performer in the Alkazar variety show on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in the years prior to the Third Reich. Her life is full of apparent glamour and adventure until the Nazis come to power, when the chosen family she has found in the club scene start to ‘disappear’ and new faces turn up in the crowd. As might be expected, the Nazis’ harassment gets worse, and the Alkazar ‘family’ begins to break up in the ongoing effort simply to survive.
As the political mood changes, Hedda finds herself increasingly unsure who to trust during this horrifying period. Her older brother Jaan sets off on a foolhardy whaling expedition to Antarctica, leaving Hedda to protect little brother Pauli as best she can; her efforts are complicated by her mother, who submits meekly to her father, a fervent and brutal brownshirt. Among the other people around Hedda are the old guard at the Alkazar; Leni, a Reeperbahn prostitute with whom Hedda shares a room and in whom she often confides; Maks, a friend from her communist gymnast school days; Uncle Joist, the blacksmith who trained Jaan and is a kind of substitute father to him, Hedda and Pauli; Carsten, a close friend of Hedda and especially Jaan; and ‘der Graue,’ Hedda’s ‘sugar daddy’ – until he isn’t any more.
These believable and well-developed characters contribute to the overall depiction of how individuals had to assess their own situation and decide how to think and act under the Nazi regime. Internal dialogue and speculation, mostly from Hedda’s point of view, about what other characters are thinking and doing, and their motivations, provide a nuanced view of the turbulence in Germany during the Nazi years and how different people reacted to it.
The strong sense of place conveyed in ‘Rage is a Bright Star’, specifically the setting of the port of Hamburg and the St Pauli district, is underscored by detailed descriptions of various locations and the use of North German Plattdeutsch dialect. The translation of Anja Kampmann’s second novel, Wie hoch die Wasser steigen (2018), published in English as High as the Waters Rise by Catapult in 2021 (tr. Anne Posten), has already demonstrated the suitability of her work for the English-language market.
All recommendations from Autumn 2025