“She Looks Like a Jew!”: An Outstanding Story of Southern Jutland’s Nazi Fascination

Erling Jepsen’s new novel begins in 1919 with Jes, a man returning from the First World War on the German side. He comes from south of the border, in southern Schleswig, and has also spent time as a Russian prisoner of war. By the time he reaches home, after walking the entire way, he is completely broken.

That man, Jepsen’s maternal grandfather, stands at the center of “My Mother and Dr. Goebbels.” Around him, the author assembles the rest of a strange and complicated family. The novel moves through the German within the Danish and the Danish within the German, asking what it means to be Danish while living so close to everything German.

The book also turns directly toward the family’s suppressed history, especially the mother’s fascination with Nazism. Jepsen once again chooses to descend into the past and the things people have repressed. He uses simple means to bring the family’s traumas into view.

The result, the review says, is characteristic of Jepsen: unsettling, direct and rooted in the peculiar reality of a borderland where national identities overlap. The review presents the novel as an outstanding account of southern Jutland’s flirtation with Nazism.