Born in Freiburg, Germany in 1964, Ursula Werner grew up in the US and studied at Duke University before going to Oxford to read for an MLitt in English. She returned to the US and attended Yale Law School before beginning practice in human rights law and for the Justice Department. While working in law, Werner began to explore her German heritage through fiction. Her first novel, The Good at Heart, came out in 2017. Her second novel, Magda Revealed, will be published in 2025. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 8th November 2024.
Ursula Werner
Florida & Magdalen 1985
‘No one in my family would talk’
My entire family is German and my parents grew up on Lake Constance in Germany, where they met through sailing. After getting his PhD in Chemistry, my father could not find a postdoctoral position in Germany but he was able to secure one at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, so we moved to the US when I was two. My father promised my mother that it would only be a few years, but then he was offered a job at the University of Miami. My parents thought that would be wonderful, because it was right on the ocean and they both loved sailing, but my mother hated Miami. So, for the entire time I grew up, I would travel with my mother and sister back to Germany every summer. Germany was where my mother was happy, and for me, the place we went started to get this glow of beauty. That was such a critical part of my whole upbringing.
Growing up, I also knew that my great-grandfather had been a high-ranking official under Hitler. When I was old enough to understand what the Holocaust was and what that meant, I could not wrap my head around what I knew about my great-grandfather. I said, ‘Okay, I can’t just be left with that story. Tell me more. What did he do? He must have known where the trains were going. Somebody talk to me.’ But no one in my family would talk. My mother and my grandmother created a kind of wall of silence between me and my great-grandmother. Although I know I’m not personally responsible, I have always felt that I needed to confront this reality in my past.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
My parents had not prepared financially for me to go to college. Luckily, I got a scholarship to go to Duke, and I was very grateful for that. I started off majoring in math and English. I loved that math had answers, but eventually, I reached the point where it didn’t, and that was the end of my math career. I also loved language. I am one of those people who has the whole 26-volume Oxford English Dictionary in my house and I use it all the time. As college was coming to an end, I wanted to find some way to study English that would be paid for. As part of my time at Duke, I had had the opportunity to study in Oxford for a summer, and I absolutely loved it there. That was why I decided to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship.
I applied through Florida and, at that time, I was in a semi-rebellious phase. I remember going to the state interview wearing pants and a sweater jacket. When I learned I’d got through to the next stage, the state interviewers pulled me aside and said that first, I should wear a suit next time; and second, I should try to figure out what I wanted to do. I was torn between wanting to study English and wanting to pursue what I felt was a social justice piece within me. I think the social justice goal came partly from that connection to my great-grandfather and feeling that I had to give back.
‘What stands out from that time is the friendships’
I see my time at Oxford as a period that was very important for my emotional growth and that helped me think more seriously about what I wanted to do. What stands out for me from that time is the friendships I made, and also, my relationship with my tutor, Lyndall Gordon. I wanted to work on Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, and she was just finishing a biography of Eliot. She was at St Hilda’s, and every time I would go and see her there I would go over Magdalen Bridge, and I felt like she was on a little island, like you’d have in a King Arthur legend.
The other crucial relationship at Oxford was with Geoffrey, who would go on to become my husband. Being from Florida, I found the winter hours in Oxford very hard, but he would ride his bicycle around in the dark and say how mysterious it was, like being in a Sherlock Holmes story. It was very important for me to have that positive spin on Oxford!
‘I went back to looking at my great-grandfather’s story’
After Oxford, I moved to New York. I struggled to find a job in publishing that would pay me enough to live off and I became a paralegal in a big firm. It was a miserable experience, but watching how a bankruptcy case unfolded did awaken in me a sense of the need for justice for the workers who were going to end up being paid nothing. Geoffrey was already at Yale Law School and Harold Koh was just starting the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic there. He spoke to me and said I could get involved, and that was how I effectively chanced into a law degree.
I was still at a point where I felt I needed validation, so I pushed myself to go and work for the Justice Department and the Office of Legal Counsel. My legal career was primarily one of writing, and I loved crafting opinions, but it was a difficult time. For much of my life, I have struggled with depression. Whatever the chemical imbalance there, I think it did not help that I was living with the knowledge that yes, I am descended from someone who, potentially, was a pretty horrendous person. But it turned out he wasn’t.
When I went back to law after taking a hiatus to raise our kids and deal with my alcoholism and depression, I felt great pride in helping people get some sort of justice. The values in Washington, DC, hyping status, power and money, began to be things I felt I needed to push against. I went back to looking at my great-grandfather’s story, and I decided to try to write the story and create him as a character. I knew that each chapter would be the voice of a different character, but the one character I would never allow to speak was the great-grandfather character himself. We would never know for sure exactly what was going through his mind, because, in the beginning, I didn’t know.
It was while I was writing that story, which became The Good at Heart, that I found a set of letters written on my great-grandfather’s behalf when he was on trial in Hamburg after the end of the Second World War. They included letters from several Jews whom he had encouraged to leave the country before it became impossible for them to leave, and they wrote saying that he had apologised for who he was and said that he felt he had to stay to help as much as possible. No one in my family had ever read those letters. They had just put them away, and I thought, ‘This is the danger of secrets.’ My husband helped me craft a website so people could learn more about my family’s story. That was just after Trump had first been inaugurated. Now I think how timely it is to have a family story of someone who stayed in a horrendous administration but who tried to do the right thing.
‘You can learn a lot from the painful parts of your life’
At the time I made that discovery, I was in the process of confronting who I was, as a person who suffered from depression and alcoholism. I would say that getting sober has been the hardest thing I have done in my life. I started going to a 12-step programme in Alcoholics Anonymous, and that was fantastic, because it basically said, ‘You are no better or worse than anybody else.’ For me, that was very freeing.
My writing is definitely something that motivates and inspires me. I love being able to use my imagination, to create something and send it out into the world. I’m also motivated by the small things that I can do to help others. I think the best advice I can offer to others is to find a way to better appreciate being here and seeing the beauty of being here. If you can find something beautiful in your world that you can be grateful for, it makes it much easier to live your life. I would also say that you can learn a lot from the painful parts of your life. You won’t see that when you’re in those moments – you just have to walk through them – but there will be something to learn from. Difficult experiences are not for nothing, no matter how painful they might be when you are living them.