Stirred by Infinity

Margot Benary-Isbert's Post-War Novels

Jul 17, 2025

Here at Mirrored Longings, I’ve covered novels about a Lutheran seminary student in 1930s Germany and wartime Nagasaki and St Maximilan Kolbe’s war. My first book profile was about a pair of memoirs about raising bookish American children during and after WWII. I also clearly love retro literature that would be called young adult in today’s genres. So it feels natural to me to introduce you to Margot Benary-Isbert’s Ark duology.

Margot Benary-Isbert (1889-1979) was born in the Prussian town of Saarbrücken, and grew up in Frankfurt am Main. She lived to see her beloved Germany crumble under the weight of two wars and two tyrannous regimes. The Germany she knew as an adult looked nothing like what she could have imagined as a child. Johanna Spyri’s Europe, immortalized in Heidi (1880-1881), was the Europe of Benary-Isbert’s childhood. Benary-Isbert grew up in Otto von Bismarck’s newly unified Germany, in the very city where Heidi came to live. Benary-Isbert studied journalism at university and worked at the Völkermuseum (now the Weltkulturenmuseum) until her marriage to William Benary.1

The Frankfurt am Main of Benary-Isbert’s childhood, 1901. *Wikimedia Commons*.

William Benary came from a seed-growing family in Erfurt, and Benary-Isbert enjoyed a life surrounded by botany, to which she paid homage in her middle-grade novel Blue Mystery (1951) about the creation of a blue-purple-black gloxinia. She also bred Great Danes (her love for dogs would show up in many of her children’s novels), traveled internationally, and published her writing in short stories and magazines.

Benary-Isbert stopped publishing in 1933, because her decision to not enroll in the Nazi writer’s organization closed off major publishing avenues. She did not stop writing, though her life grew more challenging as she worried about her Jewish heritage endangering herself and her daughter. The Benarys survived the war, but fled East Germany after it was put under Russian control. In the fever of post-war desperation, Benary-Isbert stayed on a farm, then in a small town, and even in a single-family apartment with another family. In such upheaval she wrote The Ark, publishing it in 1948 in German as Die Arche Noah. This novel launched her career as a children’s novelist. Benary-Isbert and her family emigrated to the United States in 1952, settling in California, where she continued to write. She would not live to see Germany reunited in 1989-1991, since she passed away in 1979.

Writing for Post-War German Children

Benary-Isbert’s novels were written in the midst of her life and to those around her, the German people in the years immediately following the war. Her books provide a realistic glimpse into what everyday people, who were neither sold out to Nazism or directly targeted by them, did after the war. With hindsight (not always 20/20), it’s easy to label people as black and white, evil and good, Nazi and resistance, but it’s much more complex than that.

Benary-Isbert throws her readers into the busy world of those trying to survive in West Germany. This was her world: juggling ration cards and worries about currency changes and slight envy of well-fed American occupiers. Much WWII fiction focuses on resistance fighters and the groups that Hitler directly targeted for genocide. However, Hitler’s policies2 were bad for everyone, and the war led to widespread displacement, homelessness, and hunger, regardless of political affiliation, past personal wealth, or former land ownership.3 Benary-Isbert decided that the best way to help her young readers—some whom were former Hitler Youth—was to help them realize the humanity of every person around them.

Take Katinka, a young actress in Benary-Isbert’s novel The Castle on the Border (1956):

Katinka was a Rumanian German of a family that had been settled in southeastern Europe for centuries. In the fall of 1940 they had suddenly been forced to leave their beautiful old farm because Hitler was taking them “back home to the Reich.” Since then they had been homeless. For two years they had stayed in the vicinity of Salzburg waiting for the new farm that had been promised to them. Then they were sent hither and thither. After the end of the war they made their way back to their old place in Rumania, but there they were no longer wanted. They were deported, pushed back and forth over the frontiers, no longer belonging anywhere.4

There’s a bit of Benary-Isbert’s personal history in Katinka’s story. She knew her readers could learn to respond to the influx of refugees and displaced persons all over Germany with more sympathy, if they could hear Katinka’s story and develop an empathetic imagination. For readers like herself who were war refugees and displaced persons, she could mirror their stories.

The post-war period of uncertainty, economic upheaval, and political confusion is where Benary-Isbert set her stories in The Ark and Rowan Farm. It’s not idyllic, untouched countryside; the dirty fingers of war smeared all of Europe. Benary-Isbert sets her pen on the chaotic post-war years in Germany, writing to “all those German children whose fathers will never come home.”5

The Ark and Rowan Farm

The Ark begins with the Lechow family, a mother and her four children, wandering bombed-out streets, looking for the housing allocated to them as displaced persons. The Lechows carry many burdens, more emotional than physical as they have lost most of their belongings. Margret suffers from the memory of watching her twin brother shot for resisting a Nazi soldier. Matthias works in construction though he longs to study the stars. All of them are weighed down by fears about Mr. Lechow, a doctor imprisoned in Russia.

*The Ark*, republished by Purple House Press.

When Matthias and Margret find steady work on Rowan Farm for Mrs. Almut, they find an abandoned train car. Like Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children (1924), the Lechows renovate the car, naming it the Ark after the biblical story, and move in. It might seem odd that they choose that name after the deluge of the war. Having such a refuge would have been an ark when Mrs. Lechow and Matthias were in concentration camps, or when they were forced out of their homeland by the Russian occupation. Yet, most of the time Noah and his companions spend on the biblical ark occurs after the storm and flood (Genesis 8:1-19). I think it is this period that Benary-Isbert’s characters associate with their ark: coming to rest and waiting for the dove to bring an olive leaf before leaving to build its nest.

The Ark is not shy about the state of post-war West Germany. It’s a mess, with displaced persons and refugees and food scarcity and bombed-out cities and unreliable transportation and wildly unstable currency. Benary-Isbert, writing to the people around her, does not over-explain the hardships. Yet, what stands out to me is the characters who people her novels. She breaks down dividing walls by writing characters are human, all at once greedy and generous, selfish and kind, thoughtless and tender.

Rowan Farm, the sequel to The Ark, picks up where The Ark ends (spoiler: Mr. Lechow comes home). The Lechows are healing, individually and as a family, drawing into their circle a lost young boy, the village’s wise woman, and an energetic young teacher. Benary-Isbert casts a close and critical eye on the challenges rural communities faced when they were expected to welcome large groups of refugees, their countrymen who had no place else to go.

*Rowan Farm*, republished by Purple House Press.

Benary-Isbert’s love for animals, indulged through Margret who longs to be a veterinarian, shines in Rowan Farm. Margret starts breeding Great Danes and rescues a Shetland pony, learning about human nature as well as animals along the way. Benary-Isbert’s adolescents long to set off on their dream careers—acting, astronomy, veterinary science—but she remains a realist while offering hope for a future. It was not too long since her young readers could not even hope to live through the war.

Benary-Isbert’s books are perfect for readers who want to know “what happens next” after the war, for those in West Germany. As a reader whose ancestry includes some of those well-fed, occupying Americans in West Germany during the Cold War, I appreciated getting a better sense of what life was like for Germans in the West just after the war.

We often romanticize the anti-Nazi resistance, to the point where we forget that normal people had to feed themselves, take care of toddlers or aging family members, and deal with health problems before, during, and after the war. Informal resistance looked like helping a neighbor, refusing to join the Nazi writer’s party, or clinging to your beliefs in human dignity despite governmental mandates to despise other human beings. Just like today, many German people had dependents to care for. Not everyone had the freedom to risk their lives for assassination attempts or sabotage. What Benary-Isbert’s novels show is how the everyday choices of everyday citizens, affluent or not, can support or undermine the lives of their neighbors.

Conclusion

As the war ended, Benary-Isbert lost her beloved Erfurt, in the region of Thuringia, to Russian occupation. Erfurt had been bombed more than a dozen times, losing the lives of 1,500 civilians.6 Benary-Isbert could easily have turned to the absurdism and nihilism of her generation and place. She had seen cities destroyed, ways of life lost to history, and extermination of human life so monstrous that a new word had to be coined to name such an evil. Yet, Benary-Isbert chose to believe in meaning. She chose to hope. She chose to do what came naturally—telling a story—and to use her gift to encourage those who needed it.

At the end of Rowan Farm, astronomy-loving Matthias considers his place in the world:

…he looked up at the starry sky again. Today he was not thinking of his data and calculations; he was only standing and looking—a young man in his small segment of time, stirred by the infinity that embraces all, in which the universe is enclosed and in which nothing is meaningless, nothing lost.7

The circumstances that I grew into are much easier than Benary-Isbert’s. I have never had to hide during an air raid, have a ration card, or worry if my currency will drastically depreciate overnight. Yet, I grew up in the world of terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and an awareness of constant violence on a global scale. I’m tempted to believe that loss and meaninglessness are the way of the world. Benary-Isbert, with her personal experience of war, gives me courage that “infinity” will “embrace all,” that “nothing is meaningless” or “lost” in the universe. I cannot number the stars, only gaze up at them, trusting that their number is enclosed in a hand through which nothing slips, even though it is pierced.

For Further Reading

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The Ark by Margot Benary-Isbert (republished)
Rowan Farm by Margot Benary-Isbert (republished)
The Castle on the Border by Margot Benary-Isbert (Internet Archive)