A Film is Just a Film

Watch the book trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzkK-BqbhN8.

No, really.  Watch the book trailer.

Jürgen Fauth’s snappy first novel, Kino, is a pastiche of genre:  thriller, historical mystery, and even a sly bildungsroman, although, as is often the case in contemporary coming-of-age stories, the protagonist should be grown up by now.   She was beginning to resent the long hours at the hospital, we are told, when Wilhemina “Mina” Koblitz returns home, from another day watching her husband wrestle with the dengue fever that spoiled their honeymoon.  She trips over a parcel – wedding present?  No, a print of Tulpendiebe (The Tulip Thief), the 1927 classic directed by her grandfather Klaus Koblitz, never seen outside of Germany and long presumed, like all his other films, to have been destroyed by the Nazis. 

After a few calls to film scholars the next morning, Mina sprints off to Berlin (because of the size of the film, it can only be shown on an antique German projector), leaving behind her hospitalized husband and falling into a sometimes comic cloak-and-dagger, he-said-she-said discovery of the lives of her grandparents.  Her grandfather, when he finally made it to Hollywood, committed suicide after the failure of his only American film.  Mina’s father was just a boy at the time and is outraged at her exhumation of a painful past.  Was Kino a coward, a madman, a brutal husband, a Nazi collaborator?  A visionary of motion pictures?  A grandiose hack?  Certainly he had the ego to christen himself, while still a stuntman, ”Kino,” which means “cinema.”  Is he, as his granddaughter becomes, too obsessed by “Kino” to mind the world around him?

In Berlin, the print is stolen from Mina.  A stranger gives her Kino’s diary, which includes this passage:

Watching a perfect movie is like climbing a smooth wall – there’s nowhere for your fingers to grab hold.  I was always looking for something broken, a scar, a sign of struggle or damage, something that didn’t fit, a crack that would create a space for everything that wasn’t perfect.

The world saw later, in black-and-white footage from the liberated camps, the true face of German perfection.  A vision of a rigid world without contradiction, where flaws and weaknesses were removed, suffocated, exterminated, and burned.  My world would have all the freaks, homos and Jews in it, and all the gypsies and pimps, Tauntziengirls and Bonzen, too.  The innocent were blessed along with the sinners, and that’s why everyone gets gold at the end of Tulpendiebe.  Goebbels was no idiot, but he didn’t understand art or truth – he dealt only in death and control.

Chased out of Berlin, Mina flies to Hollywood to confront her grandmother (once the luminous star of Tulpendiebe, now a geriatric junkie) but continues to be stalked by shady characters who want the film for various nefarious reasons.  Do Kino’s films haunt the dreams and even the waking life of those who see them?  Can they be used as an instrument of torture?  We stray into hyper-realist and even magic realist territory which is never satisfactorily addressed or resolved.  Perhaps it is here that the novel, like the films of Kino, suffers slightly from trying to do too much.

But the resolution, in which Mina finds the family she was unable to create in her marriage, is a moving one.  The depiction of the German film industry in the 30’s, told through Kino’s diary with appearances by Fritz Lang, Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich and the rest of the gang, will delight any student of film history or classic cinema.

Kino
Jürgen Fauth
Novel, Atticus Books, 2012
258 pages

After D-Day by Judith Barrington

 Ooops, pardon the technical difficulty!  This post is now on the correct page. 

In my first memoir-writing workshop, taught by Hettie Jones, Hettie gave us a list of recommended books to read, a list she compiled, she told us, by raising her eyes from her desk and looking at her shelf.  Classics of the genre were “recommended.”  The only volume that was mandatory was “the Barrington book”:  Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington. 

A writing teacher and memoirist (her own memoir, Lifesaving, is exquisite) and poet, Judith was kind enough to become my friend on Facebook and to share her thoughts on this website.  She has agreed to allow me to post some of “After D-Day,” her memoir-in-poem that details both the Normandy invasion and her own launch into life.  You can find all of parts 1, 2 and 3 of the poem at the website best poem journal.  And in a few weeks, Judith will discuss the poem via an e-terview, so stay tuned!

“After D-Day”

One:  Gestation
1
What does it mean to be born in war – to enter the fray
as Spitfires and Messerschmitts fall from on high
into the farmland I’ll grow up to walk on Sundays?

What does it mean to be born as walls fly
and live electric wires swoop to the ground
sending their sparks up into the flak-filled sky?

Still inside my mother, I shudder at the sounds
muffled by the amniotic fluid:
the steady drone of Luftwaffe bombers, northbound

to London, or banking to turn above the wooded
weald of Sussex and dump their bombs on the hill
or on towns where air raid shelters are dark and crowded.

The planets line up, astrology holding its vigil,
but more is defining this birth that the lie of the stars:
an air raid begins, my mother frightened but docile;

windows explode and I’ll enter a home that’s at war.
They’ll surround me with pillows on that first summer day
but the screams of the wounded will root in my newborn ear. 

and a piece of stanza 4

Inside my mother’s belly through April and May
I kick a bit while the armies arrive en masse
Americans soon have their hosts saying “hi” and “okay”

and girls, sick of rationing, warm to their largesse.
A division of Poles, Canadian troops and Free French
chatter in various languages – men who said yes

to the call, now squeezed into bunks that fill every inch
inside the camouflaged Quonset and Nissen huts
from Channel to Thames, by Dartmouth, Strete and Kingsbridge.

In battledress with heavy boots, tin helmets
and all the kit they’ll need when they get to France,
they practice on Devon beaches where one of my aunts

sunbathed before the war, her only defense
a folded newspaper sunhat shading her nose;
she could never have foreseen this coming violence.

To read all that has been posted, please to best poem journal.

Nora Inayat Khan, code name Madeleine, a heroine of the SOE, killed in Dachau.

My cyber gal-pal Jennifer Niven has posted this link to an episode from the series “Secrets of War” about female spies during World War II.  Would I had seen it sooner. 

A book reference I can recommend on the same topic is A Life in Secrets:  Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII, although it is not for the faint of heart.  (Nor was the British Special Operations Executive, who employed these women.)  Very moving, very heart-breaking.

Can’t wait for Jennifer’s latest, “Becoming Clementine,” which, I have the inside knowledge to tell you, is NOT about the wife of Winston Churchill.

Interview with Jessica Francis Kane

 I was fortunate enough recently to conduct an e-terview with Jessica Francis Kane, author of the “The Report,” one of the finest novels I have read in recent memory.   Read the review here.  Read our chat below. 

Jessica Francis Kane

  “The Report” describes a neighborhood’s response to an intense, puzzling tragedy caused by a crowd.  How soon into the process did you determine that you would write it in various voices from the neighborhood?I knew quite early on because one of the things that drew me to the story in the first place was the idea of communal guilt. How guilty is a crowd? How guilty is each member of the crowd? To do this, I knew I needed to place characters at different points in the neighborhood that night so they would have different experiences of responsibility and blame. I wanted to think about how a close-knit community like this would put itself back together after an event that devastates it, and yet for which it is blamed.

Your details about the London Blitz and the neighborhood bring the time and place into such sharp focus.  Yet to me, the story felt somewhat timeless.  I mentioned Greek tragedy in my review, but it also struck me as akin to “Our Town” or an Arthur Miller play.

 My hope all along was that somehow, through the prism of Bethnal Green, I could write about the aftermath of tragedy in general. It’s wonderful you mention Arthur Miller. In one of my earliest notes to myself about the book, I wondered if I could make the novel do for government reports what “The Crucible” did for McCarthyism. I was fascinated by the way reports were handled in 1943: one man was assigned the task of investigating and writing a report to the government. It took him two weeks, he interviewed over eighty witnesses, and he wrote the report himself. We live in an age when it would take two months just to decide on the members of the investigating commission.

Speaking of its theatricality, someone has optioned it for a play.  Can you provide any further details?

 The wonderful screenwriter/playwright Martin Casella is currently adapting the book for the stage. I haven’t read any of it yet, but I’m very excited about his vision. We corresponded a lot before he started and everything he said felt right to me. I can’t wait to see what he creates and am so thrilled the story will have this next chapter.

 In the book, the magistrate in charge of the investigation, Laurence Dunne, is quite scrupulous about not apportioning blame.  Was this inspired by your reading of the original report?

 A little bit, but also my experience of watching modern reports into accidents or misdeeds be received by the waiting public. They are always much-wanted and so eagerly awaited, but they never seem to solve the problems people think they’re going to solve. If one entity blames another, the reason for placing the blame is always questioned. I began to wonder what good it does.

 Both you and critics mention the need to find someone to blame in the wake of tragedies such as this, and you have written that initially the idea intrigued you as something you might write about someday, but it was not until 9/11 occurred that you were really galvanized to do it.  What struck me, however, was the compulsion of your characters to blame themselves, rather than outsiders, for the smallest of mistakes.

 Ah, that’s interesting. I haven’t considered that before. I wonder if it has something to do with my research into what life was like in London during the war. At the time I was writing, our country was at war, but we had not been asked to make any sacrifices. The English home front was totally different. It was a population asked to make enormous sacrifices daily for years, and by 1943 the people were exhausted, uncertain, scared. And yet they absolutely believed that courage at home was required. The nature of this accident seemed to call their courage into question and given the weariness at that point in the war, I think there would have been some self-doubt. I suppose it is my natural habit of mind, too, however! I regret everything.

 Again, Dunne is a fascinating character who you have drawn so well, a man of great dignity and integrity.  I’m wondering how much of this is your own invention?  For example, in his later years, when he is visited by Paul Barber, the documentary filmmaker, Dunne has settled into a narrow, somewhat haunted life.

 What I knew about Dunne was this: he was promoted to Chief Metropolitan magistrate after the war, largely because of his expert handling of the Bethnal Green disaster, he liked to fish, and he redesigned the police uniforms in the 1950s. I saw a man who peaked early, a man who was in the right place at the right time, but then never did anything else great. That kind of person has always interested me.

 The report itself is referenced, sometimes in a negative light, as a beautifully written narrative, considering it’s an official report. Yet you never quote it directly.

 I show Dunne grappling with the writing of it, and the very last chapter is meant to be the opening of his report. But that is my fictional creation.

Magistrate Dunne’s wife, Armorel, is working throughout the novel on sewing a blanket which is a kind of topographical map to aid pilots in learning landscapes.  It is a fascinating detail!  Can you expound on it?

 How I wish I could. Those quilts have become a mystery to me and here’s why: When I was researching the novel, I swear I read about them somewhere. But when I went back much later to check things, I could find no reference to them. Anywhere. I was living in Virginia at the time and had the help of a wonderful reference librarian at the University of Virginia. I asked him if he could find any mention of these typographical quilts, and he couldn’t, either! I’m forced to believe I made them up.

Finally, from the “shallow” end . . . I thought the Graywolf edition of the book had the most wonderful cover.  The photo of shelterers in a tube station overlaid with text from the report.  But since then I’ve seen two other covers which I like equally well.  Do you have a favorite?

 I am so lucky to be able to say I really like them all.  I, too, loved the Graywolf edition, which was the first. And in an age when women writers often struggle to get “serious” covers for their books, I was thrilled Graywolf was not afraid of a dark and serious cover like this. I think it emphasizes the community aspect of the story, while the two English covers highlight the particular story of a couple of the characters. The first UK cover shows the legs of a mother and her daughters walking. It almost looks as if they are rushing somewhere, and I thought that was powerful. The second UK cover shows a mother and daughter in profile, the daughter very worried, the mother with a determined set to her jaw, so this captures something about the book, too.

Keep Calm and Carry On

I was wondering, in researching my World War II novels, why this suddenly ubiquitous catch phrase of the era never occurs during the era.  But now we see why.  And what a BLOODY attractive bookstore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrHkKXFRbCI&feature=player_embedded

Maltese Mystery Solved

Today the Miami Herald announced that “Aurora Trust, a not-for-profit ocean exploration and education foundation, has solved a World War II British mystery” with its discovery of a long-missing submarine.

 “On May 8, 1942, under the cover of darkness, the British submarine HMS Olympus (N35) was attempting to leave the British Naval Base in the Grand Harbor of Malta, a tiny island nation just south of Sicily and north of Tripoli that was blockaded by the Germans and Italians.”

Subjected to prolonged bombing and blockading by first the Italians and then the Germans, the small island of Malta was considered to be of strategic importance in the Mediterranean, and endured two years of air and naval attacks, known as the Siege of Malta.  For its heroism during the ordeal, the entire island of Malta was awarded the George Cross, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. 

 For more on the role of Malta during the war, check out this fascinating web site.

For a gripping fictional account, I recommend a recently released thriller, The Information Officer, by Mark Mills, which sets a tense thriller during the siege.

Remembering Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle with K-9 friend

Today’s 11/11/11 edition of The New York Times has a story about the struggles of the Ernie Pyle Museum in Dana, Indiana. 

Since it is 11/11, Veterans Day, but also 2011, a time when hard-core journalism is struggling, I thought a reminder of Pyle and his accomplishments might be in order. 

Ernie Pyle was what they did not yet call an “embedded” reporter (they were “combat correspondents” then) following the infantry in North Africa and Europe in 1943and 1945, before he moved to the Pacific theater, where he was killed by enemy fire near Okinawa in April of 1945.  He wrote about the day to day life of what he called “the mud-rain-wind-and-frost boys” and once opined, “Folks with boys over there are a damned sight more interested in reading the homely, every day, what do they eat and how do they live sort of stuff, than they are in reading the heavy strategic, as-I-predicted-in-my-analysis-back-in-1920 sort of stuff.” 

He was right.  Having chosen the unenviable task of conveying the reality of the front back to the home front, he performed his job with little thought to his own comfort or even his career, and found it wrenching to say goodbye to the troops in Italy to go to the Pacific.  The G.I.’s loved him, and so did their families.  Mothers wrote to Pyle personally, asking him to look up their sons.  After he campaigned, through his columns, that combat soldiers should receive an additional “fight pay” just as pilots earned “flight pay,” Congress did indeed pass such a law, which was called “the Ernie Pyle Bill.”

A native Hoosier, Pyle attended Indiana University, which later named its School of Journalism building after him.  Buried in Okinawa alongside fallen troops, Pyle was one of the few civilians to earn a Purple Heart.

Enigma

CNN reported today that an Enigma machine, the encoding device used by the Germans in World War II, was sold at Christie’s after a three-day bidding war for $208,137, to a “collector.” A collector of what, I wonder? Archaic keyboards? Not that I have anything against archaic keyboards, mind you. I still miss my typewriter, and think fondly of the insanely and even then antique huge adding machine my father had in his office. More likely, the collector collects memorabilia of World War II, which makes me wonder what else he has in his collection, if he can shell out that much for an unsightly and useless machine.

The reports of the sale, to this enigmatic collector, touch glancingly on the novel “Enigma” by Robert Harris, giving greater weight to the fact that the novel was made into a “Hollywood movie starring the award-winning actress Kate Winslet.” This is unfortunate, because the movie was rubbish, but the novel really is very good.
A high-strung, brilliant mathematician,Tom Jericho, returns to Bletchley Park (headquarters of the code-breakers) after cracking up while trying to crack the code. His fickle perhaps traitorous former flame Claire (played in the film by Saffron Burrows) has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Claire’s plain Jane roommate Hester (played in the film by Kate Winslet, in glasses and a frumpy cardigan because, right, that will make her plain), also employed at Bletchley, assists Tom in his quests to break both the Enigma code and the mystery of what happened to Claire and why the Nazis suddenly changed the code after Claire disappeared.

I read this novel several years ago and what I remember most is its depiction of a nearly-defeated Britain, in its fifth year of war, depleted of nearly all its resources, fighting to keep what little remained out of the hands of the callous Americans. A riveting read.

An Interview with Rebecca Cantrell

Rebecca Cantrell

I’m interested in how this series was conceived.  Did you have in mind a situation where a German citizen watches the rise of the Nazi party in horror and must take action, or did you conceive of Hannah Vogel, your protagonist, first?

I did it completely backwards! The story started with Ernst Vogel, Hannah’s brother and the murder victim in “A Trace of Smoke.” I had a gay host brother when I lived in Berlin and after I saw a faded pink triangle on the wall at Dachau concentration camp, I realized that he would have been killed 50 years earlier just for being who he was. So I started thinking about gays who died in concentration camps and that led me to the thriving gay scene in Weimar-era Berlin which led to Ernst who led to Hannah who led to the series. It was a bit of a winding cobblestone street.

The opening of the first novel, “A Trace of Smoke,” is so compelling — Hannah sees a photograph of her younger brother, who she raised, in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead at the Berlin police station, but can’t let anyone know who he is. 

Thank you! I stumbled across a mention of that hall in Joseph Roth’s “What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933,” which is a fascinating compilation of newspaper articles that Roth wrote while living in Berlin. He had an eye for the darkness and rot hidden beneath the frenetic façade of Weimar-era Berlin and that hall is one example. Once I read his piece, I knew that the story had to start there.

There are several detective novel series (Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshaswski, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone) with female protagonists, and I’ve always been fascinated by the balance these writers have to maintain between the physical violence protagonists must endure in these types of scenarios, and the fact that the protagonist is female, as is much of the readership, so violence must usually remain more threat than action.  There were some scenes in “A Game of Lies,” where Hannah was in real danger.  Can you address the issues you face as a writer in maintaining that balance?

I have to follow Hannah wherever she goes, and she keeps going to very dangerous places. Real women got hurt during that era, so I don’t shy from showing that, although I also don’t dramatize every bit of gore. I think it’s a balance of showing what’s there, but not showing it in a way that makes the reader turn away for good. Then and now women faced acts of violence against them. It’s part of real life, and it’s part of Hannah’s.

You do a wonderful job of conveying the hardships the German population had to endure after the first world war — the inflation, the unemployment — without coming across as lecturing.  I wonder what the feedback on this has been?   Do you have readers writing to you who say “I never knew this”?

I often hear exactly that from readers! Although just as often I also hear “I did know that and I’m glad to finally see in on the page.” My readers are an interesting mix of very knowledgeable history buffs and those just learning about life in Berlin in the 1930s for the first time.

Speaking of feedback, has any of it been negative.  I ask because our current sociopolitical landscape has become so black and white.  Has anyone taken you to task for presenting the German citizens as ordinary people caught up in an evil government, as opposed to evil people?

So far, so good. Like every other author, I’ve had a few negative reviews on Amazon, but overall the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I expected more of a reaction to portraying German people during the Nazi era as just as nuanced and complicated as people everywhere, but so far readers seem to be understanding the truth of that.

Can you discuss integrating real historical figures into your stories?

That’s been an interesting challenge. I have several characters in the books who existed in real life—Ernst Röhm, Theodor Eicke, Hans Frank, Adolf Hitler, Bella Fromm, Sefton Delmer—and I try to be as meticulous as I can with that research. I consult as many sources as I can find so that the characters feel true to who they were originally and also that any real life events I portray (such as Röhm’s arrest and execution) follow the historical record as closely as possible.

Your next novel is called “A City of Broken Glass.” I assume it’s about Kristallnacht.  If it were all up to you, would you continue to write the series so that it covers the whole span of the war?  Would you take the characters beyond that, to an occupied Berlin?

It is, indeed, about Kristallnacht. I would like to do nine books: a pre-war trilogy (which is already written, with “A Trace of Smoke,” “A Night of Long Knives,” and “A Game of Lies”), a war trilogy (“A City of Broken Glass,” something set in Palestine in 1940, and one set in Berlin in 1945 as the city is falling), and a post-war trilogy (with books about re-uniting families, hunting Nazi war criminals, and the Berlin airlift). There is such an incredibly rich history there to explore!

Your glossaries and author’s notes at the end of each book are so helpful.  What authors, books, and resources have particularly helped you through your research  journey?

For nonfiction books, I loved “A Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larsen (I only wish he’d published it years earlier so he could have saved me some time.)  The Joseph Roth I mention above, “Before the Deluge” by Otto Friedrich and “The Weimer Republic Sourcebook” by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, and “Voluptuous Panic” by Mel Gordon.

But really the best source is diaries, like Bella Fromm’s “Blood and Banquets” and Sefton Delmer’s “The Counterfeit Spy” and “Berlin in Lights” by Harry Kessler and “I Bear Witness” by Victor Klemperer.

And don’t even get me started on the wonderful fiction out there, from Philip Kerr’s “Berlin Noir” series to David Downing’s Station books to the original Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” to Jeffrey Deaver’s “Garden of Beasts.”

Plus the movies filmed in Berlin in the early 1930s…

Rebecca Cantrell’s most recent novel is “A Game of Lies.”  Visit her website at http://rebeccacantrell.com.

“So Much So Many So Few” Launches

Welcome

Welcome to the launch of the book blog So Much So Many So Few, which covers the literature of World War II. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” declared Winston Churchill in a speech commending the efforts of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain in 1940. That sentiment remains true, as the war shaped the world into what it is today.

The stories of those who fought and lived through it remain one of the most popular topics for fiction. While researching my own novel about a group of women and their contribution to the war effort, I read entirely “in period” for two years.  Novels like “The Postmistress” by Sarah Blake, “The Information Officer” by Mark Mills, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford (our inaugural review) and the entire works of writers like Alan Furst and John Lawton were of great inspiration to me, and as I continue to research, I want to share my experience of these books with you.

Reviews will be on the “Review” page.  The focus of So Much So Many So Few is literary and mystery fiction, and literary memoirs. The “Remembrance” page will feature contributions by individual readers describing a relative’s experience during the war.

Comments

Your comments are welcome.