Introduction
In The Birthing House, an historical novel, readers experience different time frames alongside the characters and their stories of love, loss, friendship, grief, the difficulties of life, and the joys of starting a new life. Two timelines, twenty years apart, are at the center of this novel of literary fiction about writing, memory, and belonging.
Weaving through themes of birth and becoming, trauma and time, this novel follows the journey of Clare Muller toward healing and discovery through her writing.
The Birthing House as an Historical Novel
In 1980, after a recent miscarriage, Clare Muller arrives in the fairy-tale town of Marburg, Germany with her husband and six-year-old son. She faces the adventures and challenges of living in a different language and culture and eventually with a new pregnancy.
In 2000, she and her husband return as mid-career professors, following the sudden death of Clare’s beloved father. They live in a house that had once belonged to a midwife and had been the birthing house for many in the surrounding area. As the house releases the years of stories embedded in its walls, it becomes a home for Clare and a catalyst for her writing. Her grief fades, her world expands and a book is born.
The Birthing House is not a traditional historical novel, set only in a specific time in the past. The two alternating late 20th century timelines that frame the novel are built on a multilayered historical foundation. In Marburg, Germany, the setting for The Birthing House by Kathy Taylor, these layers are visible in the architecture and culture of this medieval town and the villages surrounding it.
The stories that Clare learns from her husband’s historical research and her own searches into the history of midwives, fill her dreams and her writing with questions and connections. She not only learns about the past, but at times she becomes part of it as it invades her own life. Clare empathizes and identifies so much with the stories of women from the past, whether in the 18th century or early 20th, that she becomes both the characters in and the reader of those stories.
“I dreamed that scene like I was watching a movie. But I was there, and I felt everything that the woman did. I was her, but I was also outside watching her,” Clare writes in her journal. She is at times a mother giving birth or burying her infant child, and at other times the midwife herself, whose stories still inhabit the birthing house where Clare lives in 2000-2001.
The Presence of Medieval Times
At first glance, a visitor to Marburg can see the medieval structure of the town. The 9th-12th century castle sits at the top of the largest of the steep hills that make up the topography of the town. If you follow the cobblestone streets down the hill you will find well preserved buildings from the 1400s on.
The characters of The Birthing House wander those same streets in 1980 and 2000, that looked then and still now much the same as they did in past centuries. The town becomes both a story-filled backdrop and almost a character itself in the novel.
Stories from 18th Century Germany
Through daily conversations with her husband, Stefan, Clare learns of the lives of women in the 18th century in the nearby villages; their struggles to survive as they lost many babies and infants to illness. Women were compelled to bear as many children as possible to end up with enough surviving descendants to take care of them in their old age. And yet, in this process, they sacrificed their own bodies to the dangers and exhaustion of pregnancy and childbirth.
Clare dreams of these women and writes about them in her journal: A strange dream. The pastor was standing over the grave as they lowered a small, shrouded body into it. The family huddled around with bowed heads. The sky was gray and a cold drizzle chilled the bones. I was there, I saw and felt it all but was watching the scene from above.
As Clare empathizes with the mother of the child being buried, her perspective changes: Suddenly I felt myself zoom down and I became that mother standing there in helpless submission. “NOOO!!!” I shouted, lifting my face to a misguided God. It wasn’t her time; she hadn’t even begun to ‘ripen.’ This is how Clare—the writer of the journal and the reader of dreams becomes part of the stories of the past.
Fairy Tales of 19th Century Germany
As Clare and Stefan read fairy-tales to their 6-yr-old son, Willy, Clare learns that the Brothers Grimm collected those tales from old women storytellers in the Marburg area in the 19th century. The history of the stories takes Clare and readers of The Birthing House back in time to the spinning rooms where women would gather to do their work together, economizing on the use of candles and enjoying the social context to tell stories to pass the time.
Clare’s curiosity about the history of the profession of midwifery also takes her to the 19th century and the establishment of the large birthing houses, where poor and unmarried women went, often against their will, to have their babies. The miserable conditions of those houses and the role of the mothers as cases and bodies for practice by medical students led to high mortality rates for mothers and babies.
It was also the beginning of the medicalization of birthing practices taken over by male doctors while discrediting the long tradition of midwifery. The birthing house in Marburg was one of the first in Germany and the building still stands today, housed by the Geography department of the University.
20th Century, Germany – World War II and the Nazis
The two 20th century timelines of The Birthing House, bracket the fall of the Berlin wall and the unification of Germany in 1989. The memories of the war and the Nazi era told to Clare by an elderly man, one of the main characters in the novel, are full of trauma, sadness, and regret.
The novel gives glimpses of the holocaust and the roles that midwives and women and the German people were forced to play. Clare notes echoes of that traumatic past in her two times living in Marburg, as well as the ways in which Germany has managed to come to terms with that past.
Conclusion
In many ways The Birthing House is about writing. Yet it is deeply historical. The layers of history in the book are also texts; a weaving of the stories, memories, dreams, readings, conversations, meditations that make up the text and texture of this novel. The German word for “history,” Geschichte, also means “story” and comes from the root word Schicht: “layer,” from which the ground under our feet and the stories of who we were and who we are, are made.
