Q1. Throughout the novel, art feels like much more than a creative pursuit. Why was important for this to sit at the heart of the story?
When we think about the Holocaust, and the communities who were murdered and oppressed by The Third Reich, we tend to think about statistics (the millions lost) or of poignant traces of the dead laden with grief and extinguished possibility (the piles of abandoned shoes that are often photographed at Auschwitz). As a Jewish person, from my earliest experiences of learning about this moment in history, this was what I was confronted with. It wasn’t until I was working as an art historian, many years later, that I began to question whether this captured the full, expansive lives of those who were victims of the Nazis. Art is a creative pursuit, but more than that, it’s an assertion of importance, vitality and meaning. The work by murdered artists I discuss in the historical notes of the novel shows how these men and women used art as a way to resist their dehumanisation by the regime: they are thinking, feeling, dreaming – wanting more for themselves and their practices in spite of the violence that has come to dominate their lives. Art was a survival strategy. It was a means of escape and sustenance; it was an act of defiance, an affirmation of self.
Q2. Venus, Vanishing is such a striking title. How did you arrive at it, and what meanings does it hold for you in relation to the novel?
When I was writing the first messy draft of the novel, I privately imagined the title of the novel as The Dietrich Venus, a reference to the practice of Venus pictures having nicknames (The Rokeby Venus, The Dresden Venus, etc). But Dietrich was the name of a person, not a place, the basis of the other nicknames: Rokeby Park was where Velázquez's nude was hung for most of the nineteenth century; Giorgione’s nude is in Dresden. A novel I adore and have read several times but has nothing whatsoever in common with my book is Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus: this is probably where my strong desire to have that word in the title came from. But I had to accept that this provisional title didn’t really work. My agent also gently suggested that The Dietrich Venus was too obscure. For a while the novel didn’t have a title. When I sold it, my agent and I hurriedly arrived at a title via some wrangling over email: The Lives of Hannah Sherman, a nod to a novel that was on my mind when I was writing – also about Jewish art and creativity – Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev. Once I found a home for the novel at Picador, my amazing editor asked how attached I was to the title: I wasn’t. With my agent, we produced a long, unwieldy document full of words and phrases relevant to the novel: bits of poetry, film and painting titles. I wanted to keep Venus but wasn’t optimistic about my chances: I knew how arcane it was. Orla, my editor, proposed Venus, Vanishing in a meeting and I felt something deep shifting within me: this was the title. What a relief that was! The word ‘vanishing’ reflects preoccupations at the novel’s core: the sense of bearing witness to a lost world, of taking hold of something – giving a final, lingering look – as it slips into obscurity.
Q3. What was it about Berlin in the late 1920’s and this moment in history that made it the right setting for the story you wanted to tell?
I have always loved the novels of the British writer Christopher Isherwood (and the sensational adaptation by Bob Fosse, his 1972 musical Cabaret), his accounts of the strange, exhilarating years he spent living in Berlin amongst a lurid cast of characters between 1929 and 1931. In telling a story about the flourishing of queer life and Jewish life in Europe, Berlin during the final years of the Weimar Republic – a time of great sexual freedom, of transgressive play and pleasure – was the obvious choice. Reading novels written at the time, I found there were many novels written by men and from the perspective of men, dealing with politics and public life, but few that centred around women. I was also becoming interested in the work of Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993), a rare example of a woman painting in the male-dominated style of New Objectivity which was at the centre of the art world in Berlin at that moment. All this came together to suggest Berlin as the ideal setting.
Q4. If readers could visit just one place from the novel, where would you send them first?
Berlin would be an obvious choice for this, but perhaps it would be more useful to UK readers to send them somewhere more local. At the very end of the novel, and it’s only a passing reference, The Wallace Collection in Mayfair is mentioned. It’s a beautiful, weird and free collection of artworks that includes some spectacular masterpieces by Titian, Velázquez, Rubens and Van Dyck. Whenever I’m in central London, I try to steal a few minutes in there and always find something new and interesting to look at.
Q5. What is a painting you never tire of looking at?
Piero della Francesca, The Nativity, 1480s – on permanent display in The National Gallery, London. I love this painting so much. There is a mystery to it that makes it totally inexhaustible.
Q6. What was the very first piece of research that sparked the idea for the novel?
There were so many threads in the months that the idea for the novel began to emerge. One I’ve been coming back to recently was in Berlin, looking at Lotte Lasestein’s huge, radiant 1930 painting Evening Over Potsdam. The scene reimagines Christ’s last supper with Laserstein’s friends in contemporary dress, drinking and talking with the city skyline behind them. This should be a pleasant, convivial atmosphere, but it is suffused with melancholy. Partly, this is because the central female figure – who stands in for Christ – looks disaffectedly away, clearly preoccupied. It is 1930 and the political situation has begun to sour, danger is on the horizon. I stood looking at this woman for a long time. I wanted to write a novel from the perspective of this woman, I realised.
Q7. If you had to describe Venus, Vanishing in three words, what would they be?
Betrayal, resistance, desire
