NOTHING SUNG AND NOTHING SPOKEN

Young women in Nazi Germany carve out a space for their untraditional love.

Charlotte Kraus is once again following her crush, Angelika Haas. This time Geli takes them to an underground dance hall filled with American jazz music. This music is one more thing deemed inappropriate for a proper girl in 1930s Berlin—just like girls’ having loose, unbraided hair or wanting to kiss other girls or not being devoted Hitlerjugend members. Spanning the years leading up to and through World War II, the story follows Charlie and her small group of friends as they are coming into young adulthood. Minna is Jewish and scared for her family. Renate, who is deaf in one ear, prefers wearing boys clothing and drops out of school; hiding her disability is critical. Geli is the daughter of an SS officer. And while Charlie wants to continue her schooling, she’s not on the university entrance track and is expected to work. Tyndall has composed a moving, ardent narrative of the Swingjugend, or swing youth, that readers will at times find prescient as they consider recent events. Oddly, however, given that the characters live in a society dominated by race theory, the music’s origins in Black American culture go unmentioned, and the anti-Blackness at the heart of Nazi hostility toward jazz and swing is erased, subsumed under generic statements that “anything not German is degenerate.”

A sincere story about the courage required to be true to oneself that overlooks central historical elements.