This week on WYSO Youth Radio, we’ll hear an interview with Alexander Starritt, the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner in the Fiction category.
Starritt is the author of "We Germans" and recently visited Tippecanoe High School, where three WYSO-trained students interviewed him.
This story has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Elijah Ramos: This is Elijah Ramos, sophomore.
Audrey Kinninger: My name is Audrey Kinninger, and I'm a senior.
Alli Goff: I'm Alli Goff. I'm a sophomore.
Ramos: I'm curious about your inspiration for the novel and how you got it started.
Alexander Starritt: You know, I grew up in the UK, but my mum was German, and we spent a lot of time in Germany. I would then go on holiday to visit my grandparents. My grandfather was a soldier in the German army during the Second World War, and he was a lovely man—very kind and good to me. He was my grandfather, so he was always nice to me. In some ways, it's hard to reconcile those two things: how can someone I am so fond of and who seems to be such a good guy have been part of something so abhorrent? Ultimately, where this book came from was trying to answer that question: how do you reconcile those two things?
Ramos: Your writing style is very realistic for how one would write a letter. Did you take this from another source, or did you develop it on your own?
Starritt: I didn't take it from another source. I think, in many ways, it’s not like a letter; you know, it’s incredibly long and full of things that people typically don’t write. However, I did a lot at the beginning to give the reader the feeling that this is a letter. Once you establish that idea in the reader's mind, they tend to stay in it.
Kinninger: How would you compare the aspects of writing a novel to those of being a journalist?
Starritt: Interesting question. I would say that if you work for a newspaper, ultimately, it’s the owner of the newspaper who decides what the story is. Most newspapers I would describe as being a bit like sausage factories; you produce the same stories every day. We have some journalists here who may have views on this. What makes a good journalist, I would argue, is the ability to navigate those structures. Unfortunately, I think a lot of journalism isn’t using that potential for anything meaningful; it’s just selling the daily sausage. For example, when I worked for The Daily Mail, one of the stories we would constantly run was about an immigrant committing a crime. It could be theft or something more serious, but these stories appeared in the newspaper every day. The underlying message to readers was that immigrants commit crimes.
Journalists might be up in arms about that, and often it doesn’t reflect the day-to-day reality, but big picture, yeah, there’s that old saying: “If it bleeds, it leads.” People are drawn to stories about mud, chaos, destruction, and things going wrong. So, that’s generally what newspapers write about. If you only read the news, you tend to get that negative, slanted version of the world.
Kinninger: It occurred to me that the title of a novel functions in much the same way as the headline of an article, both aiming to attract readers. If "We Germans" is the headline of your novel, what do you want readers to take away from it?
Starritt: I didn’t come up with that title, actually. My editor, who is much better at titles than I am, came up with it. A headline is really just, you know, trying to be a bit classier, but it’s in the same league as clickbait—it’s like, “Come and read this thing.” "We Germans," I think, is meant to intrigue the reader and get them to open the book.
Goff: When writing your novels, did you draw inspiration from other authors?
Starritt: Yeah, very much so. "The Iliad" was one thing I thought about a lot. Another was "War and Peace." I don't know if you all have read it, but I recommend it. I think it’s probably the best novel ever.
Goff: What theme do you hope readers will take away from the novel after finishing it?
Starritt: Well, I hope readers will take away the idea that most of our societies are incredibly tribal. You know, put people into two teams, and suddenly everyone thinks their team is the good team. You see this very clearly in sports. I love sports, so I’m not criticizing them. But to give a more contemporary example, consider the current situation: Russia has invaded Ukraine. We in the West, rightly, in my opinion, are very critical of Russia and supportive of Ukraine. A lot of other countries would point out that we, America and Britain, did the same thing in Iraq 20 years ago.
I’m not saying that all the other countries in the world are right about our foreign policy, but I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves these questions: What did we do there? Was it justified?Alexander Starritt
Yes, we invaded that country, and hundreds of thousands of people died as a result. I’m not saying that all the other countries in the world are right about our foreign policy, but I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves these questions: What did we do there? Was it justified? I wrote this book before the recent turmoil began; I finished writing in 2019 when things were still relatively stable. But since then, wars have erupted in Ukraine and in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. Unfortunately, I see many parallels. One of them is the demonization of large groups of people, which everyone does. That’s perhaps the nature of war, but it makes it much easier to accept the mistreatment of others—killing large numbers of them—if you start by saying there’s something wrong with all of them. And yes, that is, unfortunately, a modern parallel.
WYSO Youth Radio is produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
