Shaena Lambert’s first novel, Radiance, and two books of stories Oh, My Darling and The Falling Woman, were all Globe and Mail best books of the year. Her fiction has been nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Evergreen Award, the Danuta Gleed Award and the Frank O’Connor Award for the Short Story. Her work has been chosen four times for Best Canadian Stories.
Lambert’s latest novel, Petra, is a fictionalized account of German Green Party leader and activist Petra Kelly, set in the tumultuous 1980s. Petra led her party to its first seats in German parliament and spearheaded protests against allowing nuclear missiles in West Germany. Petra’s personal life was complicated, and she was a passionate, controversial woman who pursued what she believed to be right even when it damaged her politically. Petra is an insightful and timely exploration about women in power and environmental politics.
Shaena Lambert is interviewed by Alli Vail.
This interview has been lightly edited for length.
Alli Vail (AV): When did you first learn about Petra Kelly, and what made you want to write about this woman?
Shaena Lambert (SL): I met Petra Kelly in 1986. I was working in the peace movement, coordinating a city peace festival for Vancouver’s Centennial, and we brought Petra to speak at the Orpheum Theatre. What a fascinating, charismatic person. She knocked my socks off when she spoke — how she wove together feminism, ecology, racism, love for the planet, freedom for Tibet. She had such an expansive mind, and such a brave political agenda. She made you feel it was all possible. And always, tagging behind, was her ex-NATO general and lover, Gert Bastian. A strange military shadow, for a woman so devoted to peace. The strangeness of those opposites stuck with me and were, I think, the seeds of this book, though it was many years before I came to write it.
AV: You tell Petra’s story from the viewpoint of an ex-lover, a current lover and a few other people. We read less from Petra directly. Was she a difficult person to get to know and understand?
SL: I mainly tell the story from the point of view of one of Petra’s ex-lovers, a man named Manfred Schwartz. I think of him as my bearded, Birkenstock-wearing alter ego. I loved writing from the perspective of a man; I loved having him comment on the action a la Nick Carraway (narrator of the Great Gatsby). Telling from Manfred’s point of view eventually became crucial to the book’s plot, as his story diverges from Petra’s, and his life choices become a foil for hers.
As for Petra being a hard character to understand — endlessly! A real mix. A narcissist who was incredibly generous. A feminist who needed a military man to love her and carry her bags! A visionary who got caught in a cocoon of love and violence. The oppositions were endless. I was so frustrated by her — and sometimes hated her. But in the end, in the end, I loved her, as did so many real-life people whom I met and interviewed.
AV: What was your research process for this book, which explores the Second World War years through the eyes of Emil Gerhardt, the former Nazi soldier and German general, and the 1980s and present through the eyes of Manfred Schwartz, Petra’s political ally and friend? How did you find the links between these periods? (I particularly like the description of one of the protests “a group of Cyndi Lauper look-alikes, pigtails and ballet skirts, the violent scent of hairspray.”)
SL: Some of the peace movement stuff I lived through, so I just back-scrolled through my memory of those huge peace walks. I was the coordinator for the End the Arms Race coalition, and we organized the Vancouver Peace Festival, which was the largest annual peace march in North America. Some of those feelings, those lived moments, I transferred over to my German story. Manfred — my narrator — is a sixty-eighter — an activist of a very European breed — part of the student movement that swept Europe in the late sixties, knocking over institutions, altering the political landscape. I loved that research. This culminated with a long interview in a community garden in Kreuzberg, with a charming man named Klaus Trappmann, who opened a bottle of wine and told me his entire history as a sixty-eighter — from the scales falling from his eyes with the murder of Benno Ohnesorg, to the falling of the Berlin Wall! I owe him so much. Plus, he looked like my Manfred. The man I’d secretly imagined had risen off the page to greet me. It was an incredible experience.
As for the Nazi era — well, it may seem that I’m covering a lot in this book, but these layers of time are very present in Germany. There is a saying my brother taught me when I visited him in Berlin once: ‘The sands of Brandenburg are constantly shifting.’ — Berlin being in Brandenburg. One feels this very deeply. The Fuhrer’s bunker is beside the remains of the Berlin Wall, and both are near some awful statue of Lenin, which has been toppled and replaced by a skate park. It’s all there, in layers.
AV: The 1980s, when much of Petra takes place, were a tumultuous time in East and West Germany and around the world. What parallels did you find between that period, and our modern times with the Women’s March, the #MeToo Movement, COVID-19, environmental degradation and the Black Lives Matter protests? (Have we learned anything from the past?)
SL: We have the potential to learn from the past, by looking at past movements, at Petra’s movement, at the Green movement. We can learn how successful they were. We can learn how visionary they were — and how they lit up the world. A million people in the streets! They didn’t win everything but the force of so many people did change things. A totalitarian regime was toppled. The Berlin Wall fell and was smashed to pieces with sledgehammers. If we look to the past we learn from our mistakes but also — as Rebeca Solnit says so brilliantly in Hope in the Dark — we learn from our victories.
We see how the world is changing now too, and not always for the worse. While Trump is tweeting out his vitriol, Black Lives Matter is transforming society. It is altering race relationships for good. #Metoo has shifted things hugely as well. These sea changes can sometimes be incredibly rapid.
AV: Why do you think women’s voices and activism on environmental issues are so compelling but at the same time so attacked by opponents?
SL: I don’t know. But it happens again and again. Women are often leading the charge — perhaps that’s why they frighten the status quo. And they get knocked down in the thousand and one ways that people think will keep them down for good. But either they rise, or other women rise after them. And on it goes.
AV: You were arrested for crossing a police barrier in protest of the Trans Mountain pipeline. How do you feel about the foot-dragging of politicians on climate change — especially when we’ve collectively been aware of environmental issues for decades?
SL: I was arrested twice on Burnaby Mountain, protesting the Trans Mountain Pipeline. Once, with my daughter, who was 19. I’m very glad to have risked arrest, though it was really frightening to go against the stated law, to be put in a cell, and to appear in court, not knowing what the consequences might be.
In both cases I was very moved by the leadership of the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam, who really have led the fight against the pipeline. When I was arrested the second time, they sang and drummed the Woman Warrior song for me and for the two other women arrested. It was, quite possibly, the moment in my life where I felt most grounded, most alive, and most proud. If you ask me “are we going to win that fight?” — I say yes. We will, and it won’t be politicians we thank. It will be through the leadership of the First Nations here, and all along the pipeline route.