We Were None of Us Heroes

Interview by Olivia Katrandjian

Set in 1938 Vienna, Alice Jolly’s The Matchbox Girl (Bloomsbury 2025) tells the story of Adelheid Brunner, a girl who does not speak, but dreams of collecting a thousand matchboxes. She is sent to Dr Asperger’s clinic, where he studies 'autistic psychopathy.' But Adelheid is the real observer, watching the complicity and courage of those around her as Nazism spreads and Germany annexes Austria. When children begin disappearing, Adelheid must figure out who she can trust, and how to survive in an increasingly frightening world. Extensively researched and deeply nuanced, The Matchbox Girl asks readers to consider the importance of even small acts of collaboration and resistance at a time when evil goes unpunished.

ORB You’ve said the writing of this novel began with a simple question:‘Who was the real Dr Asperger?’ Why were you drawn to Asperger as a character?

AJ  I was interested in Dr Asperger because he is highly controversial. He worked in the Vienna Children’s Hospital in the 1930s and headed a team of brilliant doctors, who were major pioneers of autism research. For many decades his work was lost, but when it was rediscovered he was hailed as ‘the father of neurodiversity.’ More recently, it was discovered that he signed paperwork which transferred children to Am Spiegelgrund, where many of them were murdered by the Nazis. I'm sure that if you asked him, he would say that he just was doing what he always did. Doctors are always transferring people from one hospital to another. But people like Professor Herwig Czech, who's written about this in a lot of detail, would say he knew that there was something sinister about Am Spiegelgrund.

My book is about the grey areas between knowing and not knowing. 

ORB You begin with the epigraph, ‘Nature never draws a line without smudging it,’ a quotation from Dr Lorna Wing, a British psychiatrist who coined the term Asperger’s Syndrome. The Matchbox Girl looks at the origins of diagnosing what we now call autism. Why were you drawn to this question of how we categorize, or reject the categorization of, patients?

AJ One of the really unusual things about the Vienna Children's Hospital and the Curative Education Ward was that they didn't want to diagnose children. For them, each child was completely unique. This conversation is now being debated again. Nobody is saying that a large number of people do not have really significant problems and need support. But I think there are question marks around the science on which diagnoses are based, because within what we call autism, there's such a huge range of challenges that people are facing, and opportunities. I'm not qualified to make comments on this, but I am aware that when you categorize things, you simplify the situation. And that I find a bit worrying. That was something that Asperger and his colleagues very much felt: you find what you’re looking for. They didn't want to be bound by that. 

ORB You write, as you said, in the grey area between right and wrong, showing the complexity of Dr Asperger’s character and position. How do you navigate moral ambiguity in fiction?

AJ I think it’s really, really hard, because you’re often writing from inside the heads of people. And how do you explain to a reader something that the character themself doesn’t want to know or see? But we all live in this way, all the time. All around us there is war and famine and death and environmental crisis. It’s obviously a really terrible time. And yet, when we consider these things, we think, ‘I can’t really do anything’, or we have to cook supper, or go and pick somebody up from the station. We are constantly distracted, and it was just a question of putting that in the book.

But it’s also hard to do because of hindsight. We look at the 1930s and know the Second World War is going to break out in 1939. Obviously, my characters didn’t know that. To recreate what it felt like to be living in that time, without knowing where any of it would lead, is also really hard. It takes a real imaginative leap. 

ORB At one point in the novel, a woman is crying, asking what has happened to the people who have disappeared. Her husband insists she’s gone crazy and must be locked up. The doctor examining her wonders, ‘Is the woman really in a Dangerous mental state? Is this a normal level of Distress? What now is a normal level of Distress?’ I find this question particularly timely: what now is a normal level of distress?

AJ I think that’s absolutely right. There’s currently a major mental health crisis. Is that because many individuals have a problem, or is it because we have created a society in which many people find it impossible to live? I think it’s the latter. The problem lies in society, not in individuals. Adelheid is categorised as having difficulties but, when we look at the madness of the world she inhabits, then we ask whether she actually has any problems at all.

ORB Adelheid does not speak aloud, but narrates in an erratic style. How did you find the right voice for your protagonist, and what were the difficulties in capturing the perspective of a character on the autism spectrum?

AJ It took me a long time to understand who Adelheid is. When I was battling with this, I asked a good friend, who said that I should look at a list of symptoms of people who are neurodivergent. It sounded like a good suggestion, but it just killed the book. So I came back to what the Curative Education Ward was all about: the belief that everybody is unique. I just had to let Adelheid be what she is. I couldn’t write her as though she’s exhibiting this symptom or that symptom. That just doesn’t work, and it would have been really boring to read. 

ORB What was your research practice like?

AJ I did masses of research, but I’m not a very structured researcher. I’m researching as a novelist, not as a mainstream historian. I did some preliminary research, and then I just started writing. I researched as I went along, and the advantage is that you’re filling in the gaps that really need filling. Otherwise you’re just doing endless research, much of which you will not use.

ORB In your fiction, you often write from the perspective of the marginalized and dispossessed. Why do you choose to use fiction in particular to do this?

AJ I think that fiction is the right place to do that. Mainstream historical narratives are not usually going to take that approach. The novel needs those granular details, and I think when you’re writing historical fiction, you really have to ask yourself, ‘What is fiction bringing to this that would not be there in a non-fiction account?’ You’re looking for a different perspective, a different viewpoint. And, of course, it’s critiquing mainstream history: why some things are there and some things are left out.

One character in The Matchbox Girl, Anni Wodl, comes to the hospital because her child is taken to Am Spiegelfund, and she’s told her child must be killed. I wanted to put that into history, because the suffering of mothers is quite often absent.

ORB  How do you navigate your need to tell the stories of these women and children, with having to contend with such heartbreaking accounts, day after day?

AJ I’ve only recently acknowledged how difficult it is. I normally just think, ‘You’re a writer, you’re telling this story, just do the thing.’ But as I finish this book, I really feel like I’m leaving a lot of darkness behind. Right at the end of the writing process, almost by accident, I chanced upon Dr Karl König. Like Asperger, he worked for Professor Erwin Lazar, who was the founder of the Curative Education Ward. König was Jewish, and slightly disabled, so he knew in the early 1930s that he needed to get out of Vienna. He arrived in Aberdeen and, working with other refugees, he set up a residential home for adults with learning disabilities. That work became the foundation of The Camp Hill Trust, which is a famous UK charity with a pioneering approach to living and working with people with autism and other disorders. One branch of the Camp Hill Trust is less than 30 miles from where I live in Stroud, in Gloucestershire. When I realised this connection, I was so deeply moved. I had thought that all of the amazing work done in Vienna had been lost. But the seeds had scattered far and wide, and the work continued in new places and in new ways. When people work from the heart, what they do has an impact. 

ORB Several lines in your book echo eerily with today’s climate.  U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has called autism ‘an epidemic’ that ‘destroys families,’ speaks of autistic people as an economic burden (‘These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job.’), using language reminiscent of the Nazis’ categorization of people with people with physical and mental disabilities as ‘life unworthy of life.’ Was it your intention, when you began this story, to use historical fiction to hold a mirror to the present?

AJ Not really, because I hadn’t expected us to be where we are now. I was conscious, as I was writing, of how all this stuff was unfolding around me. The book is a kind of warning: I think we’re all sounding warning bells, constantly. And yet, people were trying to resist in the 1930s, and they didn’t manage to stop what happened.

But the book is also about different forms of resistance, because people in the novel do resist in various ways. Sister Viktorine Zak, for example, was right in the centre of all of this, and she must have known what Asperger was doing. And yet for her, resistance, I think, was just continuing to look after the children in a compassionate way, despite all that was happening. It’s very sobering.

ORB In your personal life, you have protested and been arrested as a member of Just Stop Oil, and were a whistleblower on exploitative employment practices at Oxford University. How have these experiences affected your writing?

AJ A lot. It has made me see things differently, and I think I did some of those things because I was writing about the 1930s, and I was thinking, ‘Is it okay just to sit here writing a novel, in these times?’ I think it can be, but other forms of resistance are needed. I saw a lot about how protest and resistance is silenced, and the unnerving way in which that happens. Too often there is a huge performance of listening and applying the rule of law. And yet, in reality, voices that need to be heard are being shut down.

ALICE JOLLY is an award-winning English novelist, playwright, and memoirist. Born in 1966, she has written both contemporary and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction. Her memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns won the PEN/Ackerley Prize, while her short stories have earned the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and an O. Henry Prize. Her novels, including the critically acclaimed Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile (shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize) and the recent The Matchbox Girl, are concerned with recovering voices lost to history.

Art by Cordelia Wilson