Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working with the good folks at Köehler Books on preparing my novel Line of Flight for publication on November 17. We went through two rounds of manuscript edits, which turned out to be a productive, painless process. In fact, the text remains largely as written. Kudos to my editor, Joe Cocarro, who caught some important issues with foreshadowing and other details that needed fixing. So I was grateful for that and for the vote of confidence in my work (and for learning that when the word ‘then’ is used to denote order of actions, it is not preceded by a comma.)

Recently I have been reviewing text layout and cover designs by Catherine Herold. It’s wonderful to see my words shaping up into book format, and she has been very skilled at creating covers that realize my vision.

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Now, here comes the fun part: You get to vote on your favorite cover design! We’ve narrowed it down to two. You’ll see a summary of the novel as well as the two choices in this link: https://www.koehlerbooks.com/cover-polls/line-of-flight/

Your input matters! I really appreciate your participation.

Image: Hkyu Wu

After four-and-a-half years of sending out queries and manuscript excerpts to agents and publishers, I am thrilled to share that Line of Flight has a publisher! Köehler Books has accepted my novel, and the planned publication date is December 17, 2026.

This all came about in February. I had only recently learned about Köehler and their Emerging Authors program. I checked out their website and learned they were accepting manuscripts, so I sent mine in, thinking if I didn’t hear back in a few weeks, I’d follow up with an email to be sure they’d received it. Nothing to lose.

The next day, to my amazement, I received a very encouraging email from Joe Coccaro, who was the publisher’s executive editor for more than a dozen years and is now an editor-at-large. He had scooped my manuscript out of the submissions box because he loves historical fiction. And he wrote that both he and the acquisitions editor thought my novel has a lot of promise.

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How wonderful to read those words after so many agent form-emails that said not for me, but good luck! Publishing is, indeed, a subjective business. As I’ve been reminded over and over after each rejection, it just takes one yes.

Joe and I had a wonderful call the following week, and the day after that, he sent a contract. I had a contract attorney review it for me and worked out some minor changes with John Köehler, the publisher. John and I have now had two great Zoom conversations to review their whole process. Joe will be my editor. And I have a lot of work to do.

Among the many things that impressed me when I first looked up Köehler Books is their commitment to a collaborative relationship with each author. While they will certainly have a lot of welcomed professional input on the final manuscript and design, John emphasized, “You are the expert on your book.” I am looking forward to a great partnership.

Watch this space for progress reports.

Image: Getty Images for Unsplash

Recently, I’ve begun clearing out what used to be called our Family Room in the basement—the place where our daughters used to hang out and watch TV, for decades now a de facto storage space for too much stuff gathering dust. My goal is to create a sewing room. But there’s a lot to sort and give away and dispose of, first.

Among those dusty items are old family portraits, for which we don’t have enough wall space. And so, a few weekends ago we brought them upstairs and removed them from old frames (a challenging task). I annotated the photos, put them in an album, and donated the frames to a thrift store. But there were two portraits, of a man and a woman, whom I did not recognize. German ancestors, no doubt, in clothing that placed them sometime in the 1930s. Beyond that, I had no clue. So I sent photos of the portraits to my cousin in Florida, who is keen on family genealogy, to see if she could identify them.

Sure enough, she owned the same two portraits, with their names and date on the back. These were our great grandparents, Leopold and Elise Kronenberg, photographed in January 1938, who were murdered by the Nazis in Theresienstadt in the winter of 1943. I was shocked. I had another set of damaged portraits that I had always believed to be them. Eight years ago, I had carried those mistaken images with me to the former concentration camp near Prague to honor their memory. But I hadn’t really know what they looked like, until now.

I placed their photos in two vintage frames that I had saved, and today they sit on an antique sewing table in our dining room. And every time I study their faces, I ask myself: What am I doing to ensure such a tragedy never happens again? It is a question that hounds me, especially now, especially as a lawless federal paramilitary force terrorizes innocents in cities across our nation and our leaders spew lies about who is to blame.

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This is not a new question, how to resist fascism. Looking for answers as I continue researching my Weimar Era novel-in-progress about art and censorship, I recently came across a powerful novel published in 1947 by the German author Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. It’s the story of a modest Berlin couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, who go along with Hitler’s Reich until their only son is killed on the battlefield in 1940. In their grief and fury, they embark on a vain attempt to alert Berliners to Hitler’s malevolence by writing and anonymously distributing inflammatory postcards to apartment and office buildings. They are eventually arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. Otto is executed and Anna dies in an Allied bombing raid that destroys the prison.

I’m vastly oversimplifying the story here. There are many other characters and plot twists. Fallada is a masterful writer who draws sharp character portraits, closely observed from his own experiences. He writes with wry irony that enables him to convey horrific human behavior with even more punch than if he described every gory detail. The novel is long, over 500 pages; the English edition I read was by one of my favorite translators, Michael Hoffman. I could not put it down.

What is so profound about this story, aside from the fact that it is based on an actual Gestapo file, is that it leaves you inspired, despite the Quangel’s seemingly futile efforts. In Fallada’s telling, the doomed couple do what they do with full knowledge of the risks they are taking, and for Otto, with the expectation that he will eventually die for his acts. They do it because it is the morally right thing to do, to stand up to tyranny. Even when Otto learns that most of his hundreds of postcards were immediately turned in to the Gestapo out of fear, he still believes that his actions were justified and that he can die at peace with himself.

Inspiring, yes. But perhaps an aspirational certainty in the virtues of ethical behavior that went well beyond what the author knew he could achieve in his harsh lived reality.

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Fallada himself had a complicated relationship with the Nazi regime. His 1933 novel, Little Man, What Now?, about a young couple’s struggle to survive depression-era unemployment in Germany, won him international acclaim, but later novels were harshly criticized by the Nazis. Throughout Hitler’s reign, he tried to find genres that enabled him to skirt political controversy but remain true to his artistic integrity and to support his family. Fearing Goebbel’s threats of censorship and imprisonment in a concentration camp, however, he altered the ending of his 1938 novel, Iron Gustav, to be more acceptable to Nazi prejudices.

As Geoff Wilkes writes in the Afterward to the 2009 Melville House edition of Every Man:

There is no simple concept which adequately describes Fallada’s career in Nazi Germany: he was neither an eager collaborator nor a resistance fighter. In his life as an author, Fallada cooperated with the Nazi regime, most obviously by accepting officially sanctioned commissions and writing or revising with the official ideology in mind, but he also challenged the regime, among other things by asserting his humane values in a novel such as Wolf Among Wolves [1937] and attempting anti-Nazi allegory in ostensibly light fiction like Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (1936). In his life as a citizen, Fallada complied with most of the Nazi system’s demands, for example by enrolling his oldest son in the Hitler Youth, but he also gave financial and legal support to some of the system’s outcasts, particularly authors and publishers’ employees who suffered discrimination on political or racial grounds. And there were contradictions in the way the Nazis treated Fallada, sometimes promoting his work and sometimes censoring it, sometimes sending him on propaganda tours and sometimes imprisoning him. It is not overly generous to point out, however, that what resistance he made put him in actual, deadly jeopardy, and what compromises he made were in the same context. (p. 517)

Throughout his adult life, Fallada wrestled with alcohol and drug addiction, behavior that under the Nazis risked imprisonment and death. Not long after the Nazi’s defeat in 1945, he was hospitalized for ill health from morphine abuse. A few months after he was discharged, he learned of the story behind what became Every Man, about Otto and Elise Hempel, who wrote anti-Hitler postcards that they distributed around Berlin after Elise’s brother was killed during the German’s invasion of France. The couple was arrested in October 1942, tried in January, and executed in March 1943—not long after my great grandparents were murdered.

Fallada signed a contract to write a novel based on the Hempel’s story, due to his publishers in January 1946, but he spent more than half that year hospitalized again for substance abuse and related health issues. He finally set out to write his novel in September, finished the first draft in just over a month and final revisions by the end of November. He spent the next few months hospitalized again, and died on February 5, 1947, before Every Man was published.

Fallada was a real person with real weaknesses living in a terrifying world. Even so, his stories and the values he aspired to still shine a light in these dark times. There are exceptional humans of great courage, famous and unknown, who achieve moral clarity in the face of tyranny and stand as heroes among us, living and dead. We are witnessing the heroism and sacrifice of everyday people in Minneapolis and throughout our nation, every day. I have always wanted to believe that I would have that courage if summoned. I’ve attended some protests and made calls to Congress. But it’s not enough. I look into the eyes of my great grandparents for answers. I need to find those answers, soon. Perhaps I, too, will find them in writing my own fiction.

Conspiracy theories. Cries for revolution. Calls for walkouts. Charges of radical communists and social fascists. Forbidden outdoor protests. Threats of defiant marches. Fractured political parties and hypocrisy. Misinformation, disinformation, police raids, barricades. A militarized police force running rampant through city streets.

These were the elements that converged in Berlin on International Workers Day 1929 and exploded in a lethal, three-day riot known as Blutmai (Bloody May). By the end, 33 people were dead, mostly innocent bystanders, hundreds were injured, and more than 1,200 people were arrested, of whom only a tenth were actually members of the Communist parties that police and Social Democrats had targeted as threats to the Weimar Republic.

I’ve been intrigued by this event ever since I watched its dramatization in a pivotal episode of the Netflix series Babylon Berlin, because my mother and grandparents were living in Berlin at the time but never mentioned Blutmai when telling stories about their lives there. As I’ve read more history about the riot, I’ve also learned about its huge political significance as a crucial breaking point between center-left Social Democrats and left-wing Communists that facilitated the rise of the Nazis.

And so, it plays a role in my novel-in-progress about Weimar Germany. But how to write about it? One of the ways I’m telling my story is through ersatz newspaper articles and opinion pieces in partisan publications. I base these on actual reporting of the day, historical accounts, journal articles, photos, advertisements, artworks, and whatever else I can dig up.

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Newspaper accounts of Blutmai were rife with contradictions. Not unlike our current media cacaphony, every political party and splinter group had its own publications, broadsides, pamphlets, and more, to express their views and outrages. To cite just one example, in the months leading up to 1 May 1929, there were 41 different newspapers published by KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) factory groups in Berlin, boasting a combined circulation of 90,000.

The catalyst for the conflict was an order by Berlin’s police chief in December 1928 forbidding all open air meetings and marches in Berlin as an “immediate danger to public security.” Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei or SPD), who led the ruling coalition government, believed such demonstrations could undermine the shaky Weimar Republic. They had plenty of reasons to worry, but aimed their ban at the Communists whose protests for better working conditions in the Rhineland’s steel and iron industries that November had led to a three-week lockout and severe political clashes in the Reichstag between the SPD and KPD—barely six months after the SPD had regained leadership of the German federal government after five years as the opposition party.

It’s worth noting that two months prior to the Rhineland showdown between industrialists and workers, the public speaking ban against Adolf Hitler, imposed after his failed Munich putsch to overthrow the Republic in 1923, had been lifted in Prussia. This shift was justified by the fact that the Nazi party had only scored 12 seats in the May 1928 Reichstag elections and was considered to be no threat. While steelworkers were being locked out of their Rhineland factories that November, Hitler was being hailed by a capacity crowd of 12,000 at the Sportpalast during his first public speech in Berlin. But the SPD was focused on the Communists, whom they perceived as their major political rivals.

As International Workers Day approached in spring of 1929, KPD leaders and other communist splinter groups called for workers to ignore the outdoor protest ban and join in a public march of solidarity in Berlin. They also called for factory walk-outs. Given that the SPD had emerged on the political scene in 1914 by fomenting anti-government public protests and played a pivotal role in the Kaiser’s removal at the end of World War I, the party’s censorship of their own formative political tactics—when deployed by Communists—was ridiculed as the ultimate hypocrisy.

Berlin’s Social Democrat police president, Karl Zörgiebel, and SPD Minister of the Interior Albert Grzesinski remained deeply alarmed by the threats of an outdoor protest march. Their concerns were not unfounded. The two leading communist newspapers, Die Rote Fahne and Rote Front, had been railing against them since the December ban had been imposed and accused the police of being the SPD’s forces of repression. Zörgiebel, in turn, was convinced that the KPD leaders were taking orders from Moscow, a claim he promoted in an article in the Berliner Tageblatt, upping the ante by reiterating his determination to uphold the prohibition.

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When May 1 arrived, however, the response to the Communists’ call for defiance was actually quite muted. Workers were disillusioned with KPD leadership and conflicts among the various communist factions, so they were not inclined to risk breaking the law or losing their jobs. Indoor rallies were peaceful. Few workers failed to show up for work. Most Berliners went about their day as usual.

The KPD’s plan was for workers to march from various districts to the city center for a meeting of symbolic defiance at 1 o’clock. But only the Communist stronghold neighborhoods in the north, Wedding, and southeast, Neukölln, mustered notable support. Meanwhile, the police were primed to repel a major outbreak of civil disobedience.

Under Zörgiebel’s command, police swarmed to areas where demonstrations had been reported, jumped off their trucks, and began attacking anyone in the area with truncheons. No questions asked. As soon as the police arrived, demonstrators fled and reassembled. Police pursued. The situation quickly escalated into a running battle, with police drawing guns instead of clubs. In Wedding, by late afternoon, most of the demonstrators had retreated into nearby houses. Police marched through the streets in “sniper chain formation” to flush out supposed shooters on rooftops. Some protesters erected barricades to block their progress. Police began to shoot on sight, indiscriminately.

Meanwhile, in Neukölln, similar street battles unfolded. Police drove in an armored vehicle to attack makeshift barriers. Martial law was imposed on both neighborhoods. Residents were warned that open windows were fair targets, but word did not get through to everyone. In Wedding, police raided homes searching for weapons. They ultimately found only a handful of bayonets and smaller weapons, plus a dud hand grenade.

After three days of deadly street battles, despite SPD newspaper reports that the harsh police action was a necessary response to a planned, armed Communist uprising, it became clear that the Communists had been in no way prepared for any kind of organized, violent protest. In fact, the KPD’s inability to protect innocents from the police is likely one of the factors that drove followers into the arms of the Nazis, who were gleefully observing the chaos as evidence that neither the Communists nor the Social Democrats were capable of maintaining social order.

The SPD, in turn, effectively lost control of the police force, which was dominated by a militaristic ethos that stemmed from the First World War. Unleashed on the Communist neighborhoods, they shifted into high gear, abandoning tactics to control civil disturbances for a siege mentality that justified using machine guns to sound warning shots.

As I was researching this history, I came across this archival video of police chasing civilians in Berlin on Blutmai. It is short, silent, and chilling. Over the course of three days, police fired more than 10,000 bullets. They shot into people’s homes. Among the first of the 33 killed was a man who was simply watching the action from his window.

It’s often said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but echoes. Blutmai’s lessons—about the dangers of political left and center-left fractures, and about what can happen when a militarized police force is let loose on a public that is defying state censorship—are clanging. Loudly.

Image: Police and demonstrators in Berlin on 1 May 1929, photo via Deutschlandfunk Kultur

For an excellent, detailed account of Blutmai and all the political factors and factions that culminated in the riots, as well as the fallout, see “Blutmai 1929: Police, Parties and Proletarians in a Berlin Confrontation” by Chris Bowlby, The Historical Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 137-158.

The first time I visited the Neue Galerie in New York City, 15 years ago, I felt oddly at home. Something about the works on display, German and Austrian Expressionism from the early 20th century, as well as the museum itself, hit me at a visceral level. It conjured the same feeling, I realized with a jolt, that I always sensed whenever I walked into my maternal grandparents’ home in Cincinnati—formality, high standards, pride in anything German-made, love of fine art, dry humor, overlaying a haunting darkness.

My grandparents and my mother escaped Berlin in 1936, after my grandfather, a leading authority in the engineering field of machine science, learned that he would be ousted in a week from his professorship at the Technische Universität Berlin because he was Jewish. He had evaded losing his position up to that point because he had served in the German army during World War I.

Arriving in New York that April, my grandfather searched for five months until he landed a job at Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. (now Milacron). Following numerous tense encounters with Nazi bureaucracy and the U.S. Embassy, my grandmother and mother finally reunited with him in September. He sponsored several other family members to immigrate to the U.S., as well, but was unable, despite a valiant effort, to rescue his own parents, who believed they could weather the Nazi storm until they realized, too late, that they needed to leave. Both were murdered in Theresienstadt. Though he never spoke of them to me, that loss hovered heavily over their home.

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On exhibit at the museum that afternoon was a retrospective of works by Otto Dix, one of the leading artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, which cast an unflinching, caustic eye on the tumultuous, raucous, avant-garde world of Weimar Germany. Like my grandfather, Dix served in the German army during World War I, and the exhibition began with his brutal series of 50 etchings and aquatints depicting the devastation of trench warfare and its aftermath, Der Krieg (The War). I had never thought much about that horrific conflict before then. His art punched me in the gut, and ultimately prompted me several years later to write my WWI novel-in-search-of-a-publisher Line of Flight. (I realize now that it also sparked my fascination with German art of that period, which is how I eventually came to my current novel-in-progress set in Weimar Germany.)

Tracing Dix’s artistic career, the exhibition included his portraits of fellow artists, literati, arts patrons and various professionals, with their piercing stares and less-than-flattering poses. No sentimentalist, Dix was drawn to the darker side of humanity and its social consequences, which he portrayed in all of its grotesqueness. Wounded veterans and the plight of prostitutes were frequent subjects. His explanation: “I had the feeling that there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness.”

As the Nazis rose to power, Dix’s art fell into disfavor. Even before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, National Socialists gained control of the state government of Thuringia in 1930 and began an aggressive campaign against artists like Dix, whose work was summarily removed from museum collections—a harbinger of censorship to come with the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich seven years later.

In response, Dix began to temper his paintings by adapting German Renaissance style to his own taste, as in his 1932 painting Veritas (Youth and Old Age), a portrait of a nude young blonde in a prideful stance, behind whom Death hovers. It was Dix’s way of affirming the old German style with his subversive twist.

But a year later, with Hitler and his acolytes in power, Dix was stripped of his painting professorship at the Dresden Academy for committing a “violation of the ‘moral sensibilities’ of the nation.” To continue to make a living from his art in Germany, he was forced to join the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, part of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ Cultural Ministry, and to promise to paint only apolitical landscapes.

Embracing his early training in classical German landscapes, Dix conformed—to a point. During this period, among other works, he painted what is considered one of his masterpieces, Mutter und Eva (Mother and Eva) in 1935, integrating portraiture and landscape, without a trace of his trademark cynicism from his Weimar period. Nonetheless, in defying all of his critics by reclaiming the German artistic tradition on his own terms, he remained covertly independent.

Though he was never forced into exile like so many of his contemporaries, Dix remained under Nazi scrutiny. Hundreds of his paintings were confiscated and several were featured in the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition. In 1939, Dix was arrested on false charges of being part of a plot to assassinate Hitler but was later released. Conscripted into the Volkssturm (national militia) toward the end of World War II, he was captured by the French and set free in February 1946.

Dix returned to his home in Dresden and began painting again, favoring religious allegories and dark images of the war’s aftermath. Awarded several distinguished prizes for his life’s work in subsequent years, he died from a stroke in 1969 at age 77.

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Otto Dix’s story is but one particular example of what has been called “inner emigration,” a survival response to authoritarian pressure to conform. The phrase is controversial, as it implies a state of silent capitulation. The German Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt used the phrase to describe the act of withdrawing from harsh realities under a totalitarian regime. She was an unforgiving critic, arguing that such an inward turning paves the way for good people to enable horrific evils to take root.

But as a 2018 exhibition at the Neue Galerie, Before the Fall, explored and explained, artists of the Weimar era had many and varied, nuanced responses to the rise of Nazi censorship. As pressure mounted on Jews and others whose work was declared degenerate, some—like Georg Grosz, Paul Klee, and Max Beckmann—chose exile to save their lives and loved ones, as well as to preserve their artistic freedom. Others imbued supposedly non-controversial subjects, mostly still-lifes and landscapes, with visual metaphors of personal and societal angst. Still others chose to fully embrace Nazi artistic dictates. Too many of those who could not escape perished in death camps.

Taking in the powerful works at the 2018 exhibition, I was most struck by a large oil painting by the German surrealist Richard Oelze, Erwartung (Expectation), which he painted between 1935-1936 while living in Paris. In it, a crowd of people in coats and hats, mostly with their backs to us, are looking toward a landscape of nearby trees and distant valleys, beneath ominous dark clouds. Drawing in the viewer as part of the crowd, it embodies all of the foreboding and uncertainties of that era, without explicitly depicting what was already a harsh reality in Oelze’s homeland.

That painting haunts me to this day.

We count on artists to sound the clarion call when evil lurks. The warning need not be literal to be heard and heeded.

Images

Top: Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas, etching and aquatint by Otto Dix, 1924, via Wikipedia

Middle: Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, mixed media on wood by Otto Dix, 1926, via Wikipedia

Sources

Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s Exhibition Catalogue, ed. Olaf Peters, (Prestel, 2018)

https://www.moma.org/artists/1559-otto-dix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Dix

On May 8, 1933, The New York Times ran a story, dateline Berlin, that opened this way:

A huge bonfire of books, the culmination of the National Socialist students’ campaign agains the “un-German” spirit will be touched off tomorrow night in a square in front of Berlin University, in the presence of the Minister of Public Enlightenment, Dr. Goebbels, who will deliver an address on “the symbolic significance” of the gesture. About twenty-five thousand “un-German” books have been collected in the last few days. Not all of these will be consigned to the flames. Scholars have been sifting the piles of volumes, stored in a students’ hall under guard against the destruction of scientifically valuable and perhaps irreplaceable books.

The neutral tone of the lede is remarkable, to say the least, although the story’s long headline blares the news in all caps, beginning with: NAZIS PILE BOOKS FOR BONFIRES TODAY . . . The story continues:

Germany’s educational system needs and will undergo a root and branch reform to make it fit for the Third Reich, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, told the assembled State Ministers of Education today. He said it must break wholly with its liberal past to the end that its main effort would be to produce the man political, who in all thoughts and actions is rooted in his nation and completely and inseparably attached to its history and faith.

A few years ago, I would have read this and thought the narrative sobering but remote. Haunting images of the books’ funeral pyre and the circumstances leading up to it are unique to post-WWI Germany. But the language reported here about the dangers of “un-German” books and “liberal” education resonates all too loudly today. And it didn’t originate with speeches by Goebbels or Frick in May 1933.

Indeed, three years earlier, when Frick assumed a similar ministerial post in the German state of Thuringia, he banned Erich Maria Remarque’s WWI international best seller, All Quiet on the Western Front, from all schools there, for its anti-war themes.

Censorship begins with small steps.

I’m thinking about this a lot lately, for obvious reasons, but also because art censorship in all its forms, both self-imposed and state-sponsored, is a central theme of my novel-in-progress set in Weimar Germany.

Aside from the Nazi book burning on May 9, 1933, perhaps the most infamous example of the regime’s art censorship was the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition that opened on July 19, 1937 in Munich. A denunciation of modern expressionism, the exhibition characterized hundreds of confiscated artworks as “monstrosities of madness, of impudence, of inability, and degeneration.”

And who were these so-called degenerates? Some of the 20th century’s most lauded artists, including Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Vasily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Rudolf Halzmann and Margarethe Moll. And many others. The exhibition forced some into exile, others into hiding, still others who were unable to leave, into death camps.

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But the 1937 exhibition was not the beginning of art censorship under the Nazis. As early as 1928, five year before Hitler became Chancellor, the Nazi movement formed the Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur (National Socialist Society for German Culture), which later became the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture), under the leadership of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Among its members was SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

Rosenberg’s strategy was to insinuate the Kampfbund into intellectual circles of university faculty, artists, and literati via personal connections, as a way to promote the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—National Socialist German Workers’ Party) as a serious political party with a valid platform of ideas for reform. By 1930, Rosenberg had recruited conservatives who had not fully adopted Nazi ideology, including art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, giving the Kampfbund a patina of serious intellectualism. By 1933, its publications featured articles by artists who promoted the purging of art works that were not in line with Nazi cultural priorities.

Also in 1928, a highly influential book by painter and architect Paul Schultze-Naumberg helped to shape the Nazi’s narrative that equated modern art and artists with mental illness. In Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), Shultze-Naumberg contrasted photos of people who were scarred and disfigured with works by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, and Oskar Kokoschka. Drawing on racist and anti-Semitic tropes dating back to the Bismarck era, he declared that modern artists who painted the “racially inferior” were mentally sick themselves and enemies of the German people, who thus contaminated the nation’s racial purity.

Frick, a police chief in Munich who took part in Hitler’s failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and leader of the NSDAP bloc in the Reichstag prior to his appointment to Thuringia’s governing coalition in 1930, was another key player in developing the Nazi’s censorious ideology. Thuringia became a test case for all that was to come. In addition to banning Remarque’s book, as well as the film based on it, Frick introduced völkisch school prayers (praise of the Fatherland), installed racist ideologues at the Universität Jena and the Weimar art school, and promoted architecture that reflected traditional German styles (as opposed to the modernist, minimalist architecture of the Bauhaus, which had been forced out of Weimar in 1925, then from Dessau in 1932, and finally was shuttered at its Berlin location in 1933).

Frick was also responsible for purging modernist works from museums in Thuringia, including about seventy works by Dix, Klee, and Feininger from the Schlossmuseum in Weimar. In the summer of 1930, he condoned the destruction of Oskar Schlemmer’s frescoes that had graced the staircase of the Kunsthochschule Weimar—murals that had been created in 1923 by Schlemmer and several of his Bauhaus students in a vestibule built by Henry van de Velde. The frescoes were whitewashed and the reliefs destroyed.

For some in the NSDAP, this was a bridge too far. But criticism in a party publication infuriated Hitler, who declared, “There is only one eternal art that has validity: namely, Greco-Nordic art.” This from a failed watercolorist.

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By the time Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the aggressive criticism of modern art and artists had reached the boiling point. The Berlin book conflagration took place only a few months after Hitler’s installation. Even before that, local supporters of the Kampfbund made their disdain for modern art felt by organizing spontaneous Schandausstellungen (exhibitions of shame) in cities including Dresden, Karlsruhe and Mannheim.

To cite one example, at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which had a progressive collection of works, the director was dismissed in March and replaced by a local NSDAP leader. The Nazi mayor of Mannheim enthusiastically voiced his support and ordered an exhibit that demonstrated the supposed contaminating influence of art by Jews and Bolshevists. It opened on April 4, 1933, as Kulturbolshewistische Bilder (Cultural Bolshevist Images) and included works by artists such as Beckmann, Klee, Dix, Grosz and others—four years before the degenerate art exhibition in Munich.

In June 1937, Goebbles, whose ministerial title had now expanded to include propaganda, authorized the confiscation of “degenerate” paintings and sculptures from public collections for a major exhibition. His views were strongly influenced by the writings of Wolfgang Willrich, author of Die Säuberung des Kunsttempels (The Cleansing of the Temple of Art), who was soon appointed to the commission that planned the event. Willrich lashed out at modernism that he viewed as an attack on the German people and a cause of cultural decline. He defamed “all those who try to pass off the pathological as a sign of genius.” In his book, he listed artist groups and members as well as art dealers that he labeled degenerate, and this became the blueprint for works to be confiscated for the exhibition.

In barely 10 days, the commission sifted through 32 museum collections in nearly two dozen cities (many of those works had already been removed from public view in an effort to avoid fierce criticism) and shipped the condemned art to Munich. The paintings and sculptures were displayed in several crowded rooms at the Hofgartenarkaden of the Munich Residence on Galeriestrasse, grouped together in haphazard order, labeled with their cost of acquisition with German taxpayer dollars (that did not account for the hyperinflation in the early 1920s), beneath inflammatory quotes by Hitler and Goebbles.

Works included Emil Nolde’s Christus und die Sünderin (Christ and the Sinner) as an example of art that offended Christian sensibilities; Rabbiner by Marc Chagall to illustrate another theme, “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul”; abstract and expressionist nudes labeled “Mockery of the German Woman-ideal: Cretin and Whore!”; and Otto Dix’s brutal WWI paintings, which illustrated the horror of trench warfare and were thus deemed an insult to the honor of German soldiers and veterans. These were but a few of works on exhibit, which were a fraction of all the art that was seized. All told, Goebbels’s henchmen confiscated more than 17,500 works of art that they labeled degenerate.

And here is how The New York Times described the Entartete Kunst in an article on July 19, 1937, dateline Munich:

“An exhibition of degenerate art” was opened here today. It contains numerous examples of paintings and sculptures of the period from 1918 to 1933—the fifteen years that National Socialists call “our era of shame.” In the capital of German art, as Munich is now officially designated, this exhibition was opened to the public to emphasize the contrast between what Chancellor Adolf Hitler yesterday called “a clean and healthy national art” that every German can understand and appreciate and what he termed “filthy examples of frightfulness in art as inflicted on the nation by fakers, dilettantes and charlatans.”

The exhibition was organized and opened by Adolf Ziegler, a painter and Nazi sympathizer who had gained renown for his triptych, The Four Elements, which became a model for the “clean and healthy” neoclassical art that Hitler aspired to. That painting was a centerpiece of another exhibition a short walk from Entartete Kunst, which had opened the day before with Hitler’s inflammatory speech, at the massive Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art), designed to showcase the “best” of German art—thus providing viewers with a lesson in what they should and should not favor.

Ziegler was a professor at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts and president of the Prussian Academy of Fine Art, who had been advising Hitler since the ‘20s. Again, from the Times account:

“All that is decent in Germany,” Professor Ziegler asserted. “has been dragged in filth by such alleged artists. Ugliness has been dragged in to depict beauty. Streetwalkers and souteneurs have been painted by the mentally sick ‘artists,’ who thereby vented their spleen on the true German nation.

“This is only a little of what we have been suffering through Jewish-Marxist dealers and critics. They have had their years of glory. They will disappear from our art institutions forever.”

Some two million people visited the Entartete Kunst exhibition, compared to just under 500 thousand visitors to the nearby “best of” German art exhibit. After its successful run in Munich, the show was packed up and brought to more than a dozen major cities, including Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Vienna, and continued to tour, with a few extended pauses, until 1941. It was accompanied by a printed exhibition guide that hammered home racist and anti-Semitic ideology about the art and artists.

Sixteen months after the Munich show, on November 9-10, 1938, Nazi paramilitary forces, Hitler Youth, and civilians attacked Jewish homes, hospitals, schools, and synagogues throughout the country, as German authorities turned a blind eye. During the Reichspogrom, also known as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), more than 7,500 Jewish businesses were plundered, more than 1,400 synagogues burned, and some 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps. It marked the beginning of intensified persecution and expulsion of Jews from Germany.

Censorship begins with small steps.

Ridicule is not a joke.

Words matter.

Image Credits and Resources

Poster for the 1938 exhibition in the house of art at Koenigsplatz in Munich: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H02648 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de (Note: This was a reprise exhibition a year after the 1937 show.)

Berlin Book Burning: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Goebbels views the Degenerate Art exhibition, with two paintings of Emil Nolde hanging to the left: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H02648 / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

In addition to The New York Times digital archive, an incredible online resource for my research, I based this post on essays in Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937, a catalogue for the exhibition by the same name at the Neue Galerie New York, on March 13 - June 30, 2014, edited by exhibition curator Olaf Peters.

Another excellent source: “Entartete Kunst’: The Nazis’ inventory of ‘degenerate art’ on the website of the V&A Museums in England, which holds the inventory list of all the confiscated “degenerate” art.

One of the questions I’ve been trying to answer for Novel 2, set in Weimar Germany, is why German folklore is so dark, and how it shaped Nazi mythology. Take the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel—a gruesome story in its own right—for example. Dig beneath the surface and you find allusions to famine and witch trials that date back to the 17th century.

The trigger event of that well-known tale is a famine so severe that parents abandon their children in the deep forest because there is not enough food to feed them. And the climax comes when Gretel shoves the evil witch into her oven and slams the door shut, saving Hansel and herself from being roasted for dinner, and celebrating as the witch burns to death.

Where did this come from? The Brothers Grimm collected their stories around the turn of the 19th century and published the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812, and the second in 1815. Two-hundred years earlier, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) embroiled much of Central Europe, particularly land that would become unified Germany in 1871. During that war, millions died—in combat, from pervasive famine, and at the hands of marauding mercenaries, who were often not paid by their patrons and plundered the countryside, instead. The war also ushered in a brutal period of witch trials, torture, and stake burnings centered in Bamberg and Würzberg.

Estimates of the death toll range from 4.5 to 8 million, and in some parts of Germany, more than half the population perished. The trauma of that horrific conflict, which began as a feud between Catholics and Protestants over rule of Bohemia and metastasized into a civil war within the Holy Roman Empire and a power struggle among the Hapsburgs and their rivals, lingered for centuries. I’ve been working my way through an 850+ page history by Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy, and it is fascinating, shocking, and incredibly complicated.

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In tandem, I recently finished reading an English translation of Daniel Kehlmann’s magnificent Tyll, a retelling of the folk anti-hero Till Eulenspiegel’s legend. A trickster who reveals the failings and hypocrisies of his betters, Till originally appeared in early 16th century German publications, though his story was set two centuries prior. But Kehlmann reimagines his Tyll in the midst of the Thirty Years War. His novel, which jumps back and forth throughout the three decades and is told through multiple points of view by real and invented historical characters, brings the devastation of that calamity to life in a way that no formal history can. (It is also one of the most powerful works of historical fiction that I have ever read, a model of artistic storytelling.)

I missed all of this European history in high school, certainly. The Thirty Years War that devastated so many and lasted so long—and laid the groundwork for European nation states as we know them today—took up maybe a few paragraphs in my world history textbook. And I never was interested enough to study the period in college.

But I’m deep into it, now, peering into the darkness that shaped so much of German culture and identity, as reflected in the Grimm tales and more.

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And, yet. I am also asking myself, how is this actually relevant to my novel? Am I using my time wisely? Will this knowledge somehow percolate at the back of my brain and inform the story I am trying to tell? Or am I traveling down this deep and winding rabbit warren to avoid doing the very had work of writing?

I don’t have the answer. I do try to write a few scenes each week, creating new material and also mining the first, unfinished draft that I abandoned a year-and-a-half ago because I wasn’t telling the story that I wanted to tell. And I’m just figuring it out as I go along, because I cannot see much farther than the next scene or maybe two. I have a rough idea of the plot, but I never stick to outlines. My brain just doesn’t work that way when I write. I prefer to make room for serendipity.

So, what is the value of learning about the Thirty Years War for a story set three centuries later during the lead-up to World War II? I go back to a famous quote about writing craft by Ernest Hemingway:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

—from Death in the Afternoon

All of this research, exploring the darkness beneath the surface, is my hidden iceberg. I hope what emerges above the waterline is solid and true.

Image: Hansel and Gretel illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909, Wikimedia Commons

Just over a month ago, I was sitting with my husband in a little cafe in Bacharach, a small town on the Rhine, eating a sausage. Not a meat sausage, mind you, because I don’t eat meat, but a vegetarian sausage. In Germany. And it was delicious.

The sausage, meat or vegetarian, is a humble meal with ancient origins, beloved worldwide, with as many variations as there are countries. Its unmistakably phallic shape also makes the sausage a great prop for off-color jokes.

Which may well explain why one of the most bombastic, crude, and colorful characters of 18th century Austrian and German theater was named Hanswurst, or, literally, Jack Sausage. I discovered Hanswurst on my wanderings down rabbit holes and through rabbit warrens with my Novel 2 research into German folklore.

And given current world events, he’s a persona worth meeting.

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Hanswurst first made his appearance in 1519 as a character in a re-issued version of Sebastian Brandt’s political satire, Das Narrenschift, or The Ship of Fools. Brandt’s story told in verse, which lampoons the struggles between Pope Paul II and the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick III, was inspired by an allegory in Plato’s Republic about the perils of governance by incompetents. (You can see where this is going.) The original 1494 version of Das Narrenschift, which was the most popular German book of its day, inspired, among other artworks, Hieronymus Bosch’s painting by the same name.

Nearly eight decades later, in 1597, Hanswurst debuted as “Wursthänsel” on the English stage in a production by the statesman, poet, and dramatist Thomas Sackville. For the next century, he became a favorite buffoon in German farces and comedies. But it wasn’t until 1708, when Hanswurst was introduced to the Viennese theatre, not only as a character in plays but also as a puppet, by the actor and puppeteer Joseph Anton Stranitsky, that he began to achieve notoriety.

Earlier versions of the Hanswurst character depicted him as a fool in fool’s clothing, typically wearing bright yellow pants, a pointy green hat, and a ruffled collar, with his hair tied in a short top-knot. A glutton and drunkard with a penchant for violent outbursts and lewdness, he enjoyed a good fart and obscene jokes. He herded cows and oxen, and also made sauerkraut. For all his brashness, however, Hanswurst was both clever and cunning, with an odd and absurd respect for conventions and taboos.

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Stranitsky gave him a fictional biography as a Salzburger who had wandered the world and finally settled in Vienna. In Stranitsky’s plays, which were part of a Viennese Haupt- und Staatsaktionen tradition of comic melodramas that made fun of social and political mores, Hanswurst was typically a servant to a noble family, who ridiculed his aristocratic employers in derisive comments to the audience. Which made him very popular with the public, but not so with the Habsburgs.

Before his death in 1726, Stranitsky passed the torch—or, rather, the Narranpritsch (Slapstick or Fool’s Sceptre), a comic prop that mimics a whip crack when smacked and the origin of the term ‘slapstick comedy’—to the actor Gottfried Prehauser, who spent the next 40 years defending Hanswurst against his powerful political critics. When Prehauser died in 1769, the critics won, and Hanswurst was banned from the Viennese theatre. His character lived on as a puppet, however, throughout Germany, and was eventually revived by the actor and puppeteer Johann Josef La Roche in the guise of Kasperl at Vienna’s Leopoldstädter Theater.

A less obnoxious but still rather crude character who, like his English cousin Mr. Punch, wrestled with crocodiles and outwitted Death, Kasperl—both as a handpuppet and marionette—became a much beloved figure throughout Europe and beyond. An Everyman who got away with flaunting conventions and outrageous behavior, who beat the odds to live another day, was the perfect stand-in for a beleaguered public that struggled with poverty and oppression.

Which brings me to our current national crisis.

While we traveled in Germany last month, people kept asking us how our country could have elected a buffoon for president. When we offered the standard explanation—people were fed up with the economy and struggling to make ends meet, and he promised to make it all better—the response was always the same: But how could the majority of Americans elect a convicted felon? How could so many trust him?

The question of the hour.

And I think the answer has to do with the lasting appeal of Hanswurst and Kasperl. Certainly the details of political, economic, and social struggles for 21st century Americans are significantly different from those of 18th century Germans. But there is a very basic, human response to feeling poor and powerless: a deep desire to see the rich and powerful undone. Flaunting social conventions, expressing verboten thoughts and actions, reveling in slap-downs that beat the elites—the buffoonery is both magnet and catharsis for grievance.

So here we are, living with a buffoon who is (ironically and tragically, given his wealth, corruption, and avarice) revered by his angry cult as their savior and collective Id, but who is no mere puppet (though one could make a case for who is pulling his strings). No, he is the most powerful man in the world, advised by a ship of fools. And it’s no laughing matter.

Image: Johann Josephus Prunian, Hanns-Wursts Abschied (kolorierter Stich, 18. Jh.).

A few sources:

Müller-Kampel, Beatrix, “‘Sage mir, mein Freund, woher stammst du? — Ich stamme aus meinem Vaterland’”, Kaspers Welten, (2022, Mitteldeutsches Marionettentheatermuseum), 27-39.

World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts: Hanswurst

I was a thumb-sucker as a toddler. I would snuggle with a diaper against my left cheek, right thumb in mouth. Very soothing. My mother, however, was not thrilled. Her solution, she told me years later, was to cut down the size of my snuggly diaper a little at a time, until it was so small that I just gave up the habit. I have no recollection of this, and I still wonder how I never noticed. But apparently her strategy worked.

My mother and grandparents came to the U.S. from Germany in 1936, to escape the Nazis. Mom was loving but strict, and given to bare-bottom spankings when I got out of line. So the diminishing diaper was one of her kinder, gentler corrective strategies. Fortunately for me, she chose not to fall back on a classic German story about the inevitable fate of thumb-suckers, to scare me enough to stop.

In Der Struwwelpeter (Shock-headed Peter) by Heinrich Hoffmann, a boy is warned by his mother not to suck his thumb when she goes out. Of course, he pops it in as soon as she leaves. Into the house rushes a tailor with a giant pair of scissors, who—klipp und klapp—cuts off not one, but both of the boy’s thumbs. Yikes.

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I recently discovered this story while delving into cultural touchstones of German children’s literature, part of my deep dive research for Novel 2, which is set in Weimar Germany. The question I’m trying to answer is how these stories, known to most Kinder of that period, would have affected their values, thoughts, and actions. Call it character research. I’m back to writing, slowly, after a year’s pause from a 70,000 word false start, mining what I wrote previously while developing a new narrative and deepening my understanding of my protagonists.

Even as my mother, fortunately, never treated me to the terrifying morality tales of Der Struwwelpeter, there is something about their tone and story arc that resonates at a primal level. As I said, she was strict, and even if she never made such dire threats, somehow I believed really bad things would befall me if I misbehaved.

Mid-19th-century German children’s stories abound in darkness. The first two volumes of the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) were published in 1812 and 1815, and the final, seventh edition came out in 1857. The fiendish escapades of Max und Moritz first appeared in 1865. The first edition of Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter was published in 1845.

The Grimm’s tales, which include some graphic details of cleaved appendages, had a significant impact on German children’s literature of the period, according to Grimm biographer Ann Schmiesig. Severe punishments were the norm in these stories. Ironically, Hoffmann was a psychiatrist. He worked in a mental hospital and decided to write and illustrate his book as a Christmas gift for his three-year-old son, because he couldn’t find a suitable alternative. Double yikes.

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Hoffmann initially had no intentions of publishing his collection of rhymed morality tales, but at a gathering of a Frankfurt literary club in January 1845, a local publisher bought the manuscript. In October, the book appeared at a Frankfurt market as Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren (Funny Stories and Droll Pictures with 15 beautifully colored panels for children of 3 to 6 years), without Hoffmann’s name as author. Multiple editions followed, and by the fifth version in 1847, he finally allowed his name to appear on the cover.

Ten rhymed stories in all, Der Struwwelpeter includes such light-hearted tales as one about a girl who plays with matches and burns herself to a crisp (to her cats’ dismay) and another about a boy who refuses to eat his soup and starves to death. Not all of the stories end in fatalities, but bad behavior always results in some kind of awful but supposedly deserved punishment—debilitating bites for beating a dog, a near drowning for not paying attention while walking, getting swept away in a storm for not staying safely indoors. The story of Struwwelpeter is the shortest rhyme, about Peter who refuses to comb his hair or cut his nails and is disparaged as a slob.

In another tale, a group of white boys chases a dark-skinned boy and mercilessly tease him. They are caught by a neighboring giant who dips them all in ink, relegating them to literally lose their white privilege. While the basic premise of the story is, for its day, surprisingly critical of racial prejudice, the moral still presumes that dark skin is a curse. The illustrations, too, portray the teased boy with stereotypical thick lips and wooly hair. So much for enlightenment.

You can read and judge for yourself here (English) and here (German).

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Some commentators have noted that Hoffmann may have taken some inspiration from his patients. They compare the story of the boy who refuses his soup to individuals who have eating disorders. Another tale, about a boy who cannot sit still at dinner and pulls all the dishes and food and linens off the table, onto himself (to his parents’ dismay) is likened to someone with ADHD. Indeed, the character, Zappel-Philipp, in English is known as Fidgety Phil, a moniker that has been applied to people with attention deficit disorder.

For all its gruesomeness—or, perhaps, because of it—Der Struwwelpeter was quite popular. Just three years after its initial publication, the book had sold more than 20,000 copies. Since then, it has inspired countless adaptations and parodies, including plays, films, musicals, ballets, classical compositions, comics, TV shows, and rock music. The Scissor Man, in particular, has haunted poetry by W.H.Auden; episodes of Family Guy, Dr. Who, and The Office; and Tim Burton’s film Edward Scissorhands.

Fear is a strong motivator. Perhaps Hoffmann actually believed that his rhymed stories were funny and his illustrations, droll. But at some level, he must have known what he was writing. He was a psychiatrist, after all. Given the book’s popularity, it’s fair to assume that the social norms of his day not only accepted fear as a motivator for bringing up obedient children, but embraced it.

Which isn’t surprising. Let’s be honest. For all our supposed advances in childrearing and civilization, 180 year later, we’re consumed by social media algorithms that feed on fear to reap ad revenue and culture wars that are fueled by death threats. Fear is the tyrant’s most powerful weapon. Seeing it for what it is—rather than being swept away by the storm—is fear’s most powerful antidote.

Though it may not hurt to keep a pair of scissors handy, just in case.

Image: Illustration from the 1861 edition of Der Struwwelpeter, via Wikipedia

April Fool’s Day came and went this past Tuesday without much notice. Nothing like that morning, maybe 15 years ago, when my eldest daughter called to tell me she was pregnant, pulling my leg just to see how I would react. I took her seriously and earnestly said we should talk soon. She admitted her prank and said she loved me, and we both laughed—me with relief, and she, perhaps, as well. I guess I passed the test.

We’re all born with an impulse to make mischief, to challenge norms and break rules and test boundaries. Even if we’re Goody Two-shoes, like I’ve been most of my life, there’s still that curiosity to experience, even vicariously, what it would be like to be the baddie. That is, of course, the magnetism of great fiction about misfits and disrupters, and probably the reason why J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is still an old favorite of mine.

Which brings me to two of the most famous mischief makers of German children’s literature, Max and Moritz. As part of my research for Novel 2, which is set in Weimar Germany and involves the many-layered aspects of censorship, I’ve been digging into German folklore and how it both reflects and influences cultural values and societal attitudes. This has led me to rediscover the Brothers Grimm folktales in their original form, as well as other classic 19th century German children’s stories. Which is how I found the story of Max and Moritz.

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Written by Wilhelm Busch and first published in 1865, Max und Moritz: Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen (Max and Moritz: A Boy’s Story in Seven Pranks) relates in verse the exploits of two friends who play very nasty tricks on their adult neighbors. They lay a trap for a widow’s chickens that end up choking to death, then steal the chickens, which the widow decides to roast, by fishing them up the chimney with a hook and line. The widow blames her innocent dog and beats it.

Other pranks include sawing a wooden foot bridge that causes a sartorial tailor to fall into a brook and nearly drown, until he grabs two friendly geese who fly him to safety. They fill their teacher’s pipe with gunpowder that (thankfully) doesn’t kill him when he lights up, but singes his face and burns away most of his hair. They pour bugs into their uncle’s bed, disrupting his sleep with itchy bites.

Hoping to steal pretzels, they sneak into the baker’s kitchen, but fall into a batch of dough. This time, they’re caught, and the baker rolls them up and pops them into the oven. Unlike the witch in Hänsel and Gretel, however, they survive and eat their way out of their crispy shrouds. But their luck finally fails when they slit a farmer’s bag of corn feed, which nearly buries them when he picks up the sack. He packs up the mischief makers and takes them to the miller, who dumps them in the hopper and grinds them up for duck feed.

Sounds grisly and grim in summary. But the story is told with wry humor and Busch’s fun illustrations. Read for yourself in English or German to get the full experience.

Busch never expected his story, originally intended as a satire for adults, to go very far. The first publisher he offered it to, Heinrich Richter, dismissed the manuscript because he thought it wouldn’t sell. So he approached Kasper Braun, who offered to publish it as a children’s book, and paid Busch a thousand guilders, about two-year’s pay for a craftsman in those days, for the rights.

Braun’s insight more than paid for his investment. Max und Moritz was a huge success, soon translated into Danish, English, and Japanese. When Busch died in 1908, the book was in its 56th edition. It became one of the most famous German children’s classics, translated into more than 150 language, and is deemed a foundational influence for comic strips and cartoons.

To wit: In 1897, Rudolph Dirks created The Katzenjammer Kids, the first American comic strip with fully developed characters and plots, for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, with characters Hans and Fritz clearly resembling Busch’s two anti-heroes. Maurice Sendak drew inspiration from Max und Moritz for Where the Wild Things Are. The duo have also influenced creators of more recent cartoon mischief makers, including Beavis and Butt-head and characters in South Park. Biennially, the prestigious Max-und-Moritz-Preis is awarded to the outstanding comic artists and comic strips in the German-speaking world.

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While the boys’ seven pranks—and their ultimate consequences—certainly sound like a harsh Teutonic morality play about the inevitable demise of naughty children, Busch was actually aiming for a broader critique of mid-19th-century German society. And he based his characters on some of his own childhood exploits with his friend Erich Bachmann, a miller’s son, in their boyhood home of Ebergötzen. Though they never put gunpowder in their teacher’s pipe, they caught birds with glue traps, sawed through a wooden footbridge, and ran around the Bachmann’s mill drenched in flour.

Given his impish streak as a boy, Busch was acutely aware of the rigidity of German society, with its strict adherence to rules, order, and mores. He also knew the dire conditions of poor rural communities in the 1860s, a time when many Germans were immigrating to America to find a better life, and many children were stealing food to survive. He intended Max und Moritz more as a critique of the adults, whom he illustrates as fools, unable to recognize or accept the inherent immaturity and boisterousness of children who become misfits by default—or the serious plight of starving children. The story begs the question: Who is worse, the bad boys whose pranks are admittedly tinged with cruelty but are still playful and hint at a more desperate search for sustenance, or the adults who ultimately deem them deplorable and dispensable, grind them up into bird feed, and never shed a tear?

In the end, it is the grownups in Max und Moritz who have the real power to pass judgment and impose a verdict—with no check on their vigilanteism, given the townsfolk’s tacit approval. This is not mere mischief. While Busch’s light verse and cartoony illustrations make us chuckle, his message is much darker.

We should know. On April Fool’s Day this year, 10,000 scientists and health professionals were summarily fired from the Department of Health and Human Services, shuttering key public health programs and essential research that has helped to ensure the health and safety of Americans for decades. This was no prank, just one more vengeful act since January 21 ushered in a reign of ineptitude.

We are immersed in chaos, gleefully foisted on our nation by flagrant, powerful rule-breakers and norm-crushers, enabled by lawmakers who choose to give them a pass in exchange for privilege and glory. What too many Americans assumed was just mischief last November has swiftly proven to be evil unleashed.

While I must admit that a part of me would love to see the perpetrators ground up into bird feed, in my heart I pray for just and ethical consequences before it is too late to save our beloved country. No valiant knight or brave Gretel is coming to our rescue. It is up to all of us, collectively, to ensure a moral ending to this dire chapter in American history. Let’s get to it.

A few sources:

• 8 Things About Max und Moritz

• Max and Moritz: How Germany’s naughtiest boys rose to fame

• Max and Moritz in English translation

• Max und Moritz in original German

Image: Illustration of Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch, Public Domain, via Wiki Commons

I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters lately. Not surprising, given our current political state of affairs. But it goes much deeper than that.

In my novel-in-search-of-an-agent/publisher, Line of Flight, the monster lurking in the background is World War I. It creeps into scenes at the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris, where patients suffer from horrific burns, amputations, sepsis, and other ravages of brutal trench warfare. It haunts lovers and spouses. It destroys relationships and livelihoods.

In my work-in-progress Novel 2, set in Weimar Germany, the monster is still emerging. There is the obvious metaphor—Hitler and his Nazi thugs—as well as more subtle apparitions—censorship in all its forms: institutional, peer-pressure, and the most insidious manifestation, self-imposed.

Wrangling with all this has pushed me to explore German folklore, fairy tales, and cultural touchstones, which are rich with monsters and themes of confronting malevolence. I’m also intrigued by questions raised by Lynda Barry in her wonderful graphic memoir, What It Is: the formless thing which gives things form. Through ink-and-watercolor illustrations, collages, and hand-printed text, Barry digs into the subconscious well-spring that is the source of story, character, and plot. And she asks:

What is a monster?

Why are monsters in so many old stories?

Why do we need them?

That last question is the one tugging on me the most. I don’t yet have a clear answer. But there are plenty of places to look.

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Recently I watched the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, eine Symphony des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror), the original vampire movie, which was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897. Directed by F.W. Murnau, the film was shot in 1921, just three years after the end of World War I. Murnau himself was a veteran of trench warfare who fought on the Eastern Front for Germany, also an airman who survived eight crashes. Max Schreck, who plays Count Orlok (the vampire), was also a German veteran of trench warfare, as was producer Albin Grau.

By today’s horror film standards, the original Nosferatu is far from frightening, but the acting is wonderful and the German Expressionist eeriness still haunts. Because Grau and Murnau did not acquire film rights to Stoker’s novel, they tried to cover their tracks by making some changes to the story. So Count Dracula became Count Orlok, and other characters’ names and details were altered. But the basic plot remains the same:

In 1838, a hapless real estate agent, Hutter, visits a mysterious count in his creepy Transylvanian castle to seal a deal for a residence across the street from his own home in the fictional town of Wisborg, Germany. The count desires Hutter’s wife, Ellen. Hutter discovers Orlok’s casket bed and realizes he’s a vampire, but is unable to stop him from leaving the castle for Wisborg. Upon his arrival by ship, Orlok lets loose thousands of rats that infest the town with a plague. Ellen sacrifices herself to Orlok’s blood-sucking bite to save her community; Orlok becomes so immersed in seducing her that he loses track of time, vanishing in a puff of smoke when the first cock crows at sunrise.

Yes, it’s melodramatic. But still a great film classic that became a template for a century of horror movies. Murnau and Grau were sued by Stoker’s heirs for copyright infringement after the film debuted, and the court ordered that all copies be destroyed. Fortunately, some original prints were saved, which is why we can still view the film today.

Grau’s experience in the trenches may have pushed him to take the risk. He once described the war as “this monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of people.” Vermin in the form of rats and plague, which thrived in the trenches, are essential to the plot. It’s also worth remembering that the Spanish Influenza epidemic, which claimed 50 million lives worldwide between 1918-1919, was still a fresh trauma.

There are other, more insidious allusions to monsters in the film, however. Count Orlok has a prominent beaked nose, an unmistakeable reference to depictions of Jews since the late Middle Ages. While Hitler had not yet risen to power and his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich didn’t take place until 1923, themes of vermin attacking innocent Germans were not unfamiliar anti-Semitic tropes. Jews and Bolsheviks (often equated) were roundly blamed for backstabbing Germany and causing the nation’s catastrophic loss. Not to mention blood libels about Jews who supposedly kill children to make Passover matzoh, which date back to medieval times. All summed up in the title ‘Nosferatu’, which may be derived from the ancient Romanian ‘Nesuferitul’, “the offensive one.”

Which brings me back to Barry’s question, Why do we need monsters? Clearly, in Nosferatu, monsters are conjured as scapegoats for disaster. But that is still too simple an answer. Barry digs deeper:

In a myth or fairy tale, one doesn’t restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can’t be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done?

Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death convincingly. The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it’s there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt trouble in the story, your kingdom isn’t dead.

A banquet of food for thought.

For more about the film, see this well-researched entry on Wikipedia.

Image: Still shot from Nosferatu, eine Symphony des Grauens, 1922

I came a bit late to Masters of the Air, which first aired in January 2024 on Apple TV+. The third of Steven Spielberg’s and Tom Hank’s World War II miniseries—capping off Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010)—the nine-episode historical drama tells the grueling story of the U.S. Army Airforce 100th Bomb Group’s deadly missions over Nazi Germany from 1943 to 1945.

Looking for something that would take my mind off the news in the evening, I decided this held promise. (Yes, I realize it was an ironic choice.) No surprise that I’m always drawn to historical dramas, and given my research for Novel 2, this felt like a good fit.

Spoiler alert: Masters of the Air is not relaxing. But it is very compelling. I just finished watching it this week, and while the series received mixed reviews, I found it both mesmerizing and haunting. The 100th suffered huge losses in every mission until the Army was able to recruit and train more pilots and build better fighter planes. But they kept on flying.

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Based on a history of the American Eighth Air Force, Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller, the story focuses on several real-life war heroes from the “Bloody 100th”—pilots Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler), Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) and Major Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (Nate Mann)—as well as lead navigator Lt. Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle), who narrates the story.

Two of the historic Tuskegee Airman, who broke the color barrier in the U.S. Army Airforce, also are featured in the last two episodes. Although not members of the 100th, 2nd Lt. Alexander Jefferson (Brandon Cook) and Lt. Robert H. Daniels (Ncuti Gatwa) are among the airmen imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, a POW camp in Poland.

After spending nine-plus hours with these characters over the course of the series, I found the closing notes and photos of what happened to the real people behind the story to be truly moving.

Critics have pointed to an uneven narrative arc, with key characters dropping out of the story without explanation, only to reappear later. Some drop out entirely. Others have faulted the choice to tell the story through the point of view of the airmen, rather than give full historical context to the reasons why the 100th was tasked with so many suicide missions. And in the end, our heroes literally fly off into the sunset.

But I’ll forgive all of that. Because the attention to detail is extraordinary—right down to recreating two vintage B-17 bombers, so you really feel what it was like to by flying inside them—and the portrayals of courage under fire are stirring.

The series, which cost $250 million and took a decade to produce, takes you literally into the cockpit and belly of B-17 bombers during daytime air raids over Nazi Germany. Riding along with the airmen, you feel the crew’s growing angst as flack puffs around their “flying fortress” and suddenly goes silent before the inevitable Luftwaffe attack. Each shake and quiver and bounce and crash resonates through the screen. Fireballs shatter engines and rip off wings. High altitudes cause frostbite, jam machine guns, and freeze escape hatches. Death stalks relentlessly.

It is all too real, terrifying, and gripping. I am not one for gore, but I could not look away. Throughout the series, I kept thinking about what it took for these men to keep getting back in those bombers, despite the coin-flip odds of returning alive.

What happened to people on the ground is another story, and the series does attempt, somewhat superficially, to address the terror of all those bombs for civilians, both German and British (during the Blitz). It also glimpses at the horrors of the Holocaust. There are some predictable lines about the bad guys getting what they deserve.

Again, however, what kept me watching were the very believable portraits of valor, personal sacrifice, and a sense of duty to values that used to unite us as a nation. It made me ponder how the most terrible human experiences can and do bring out the best in us. And it made me wonder—will we, too, rise to meet our dark moment in history? And isn’t that the soul searching that real art challenges us to do?

Image: Austin Butler as Major Gale “Buck” Cleven in Masters of the Air on Apple TV+

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been immersed in research about the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918-1933) and the rise of the Nazis, grist for Novel 2. I’ve climbed down a lot of dark rabbit holes. Among my most startling discoveries (though in hindsight, not so startling) was how the Nazi propaganda machine manipulated folktales—in particular, stories by the Brothers Grimm—to convince citizens of the purity and value of their German-Nordic heritage, a cornerstone of Nazi ideology.

Given our sudden, stark political reality here in the U.S., we need to be vigilant for similar manipulations of foundational stories that fuel hatred and “othering.” So, here’s what I learned:

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their first volume of 86 folktales in 1812 and a second volume of 70 stories in 1815. Known as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), the stories were based on extensive folklore field research, but were revised and embellished over the next 40 years. Wilhelm Grimm published the final, seventh edition in 1857.

The Grimm brothers’ original goal was to uncover the essence of the Germanic people by collecting stories that had transcended time and local communities. Germany was not yet a unified nation, but a mass of more than 200 German-speaking, often-warring principalities. Next door, Napoleon reigned as Emperor of France.

Not only did the Grimms hope to define a unifying national identity that would overcome internecine conflict. They also hoped to bring German-speakers together to block Napoleon’s ambitions to conquer Europe. Their lofty intent, shared within their academic circle, was to imbue pride in the folk tradition and to promote the notion of valuing justice.

So, that’s the origin of such well-known and loved stories as Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and more. As part of my research, I read a number of the original tales in the 1812 edition (English translation by Jack Zipes). Though the plots are often quite dark, the early versions are also often quite droll. There is always a fantastical element—a cat that talks and walks upright in boots, a flea and a louse that live together and make soup in an eggshell, wicked witches, conniving elves. The reward for the clever male upstart is a beautiful princess bride. Kings are easily duped. Some men are terrible fools, outsmarted by women who escape bad marriages. But more often than not, women are constrained by their fathers and husbands.

There are brutal and unfair tales—babies swapped for changelings, creatures slaughtered, heads chopped off, limbs. There is an acknowledged cruelty to life as well as a striving, often for wealth and power to relieve extreme poverty. The language in these early versions of the folktales is sparse, sometimes in verse, capturing the voices of the people who told these stories to the Grimms. There is little embellishment, mostly pure plot line. Some stories have several versions.

For all their gruesomeness, Grimms’ Fairy Tales convey deeply felt human struggles that continue to resonate across the centuries. Part of the Western cultural canon, the brothers’ stories were praised by the poet W.H. Auden as foundational works. They have inspired myriad retellings in print and reinterpretations in theatre, ballet, opera, and, of course, in Disney animation.

So, it’s no wonder that the Nazis seized on these classic tales, embedded in the German psyche, as fertile ground for their own poisonous messaging. With slight, imperceptible modifications in the stories’ retelling, Nazi propagandists emphasized pastoral settings and peasant origins to reinforce their claims of the purity of the Aryan race.

For example, in the 1937 film Die Sieben Raben (The Seven Ravens), a stop-action animation that premiered just a few weeks before Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, rural motifs, including farm and forest animals, a spinning wheel, a loyal farmers’ daughter, the brothers she saves from their fate as ravens, who then rescue her from being burned at the stake for witchcraft—all subtly combine to anchor the tale in the nobility of peasant values. For a deep dive, see Nicholas Miller’s excellent research, here.

By the mid 1930s, German folklorists, dedicated to anthropological and linguistic research to uncover accurate accounts of folk traditions and values, were pressured to make their findings conform to Nazi ideology. They were told to “weed out” any elements in Germanic myths, customs, and rituals that were deemed “alien.” They were compelled to link North Germanic history to Icelandic and Norwegian saga literature. For detailed analysis, see Christa Kamenetsky’s “Folklore as a Political Tool in Nazi Germany, on JSTOR.org.

According to Kamenetsky, Hitler both romanticized peasantry and deemed peasants the “cornerstone of the whole nation.” Peasants were praised both for their racial purity, as descendants of Nordic-German ancestors, and mythologized for their “fighting spirit.” “The Third Reich,” proclaimed Hitler, “will be a peasant Reich, or it will not be at all.”

The Brothers Grimm hoped their stories would help to forge a common German identity as a bulwark against Napoleon’s imperialism, as well as to build a foundation for a unified German nation. But they based that idealistic goal on deeply researched folktales that captured humanistic themes. The Nazis saw the power of those stories and warped them to weaponize the unifying force of professed superiority and exclusion of undesirables.

As we enter this dark chapter of American history, it’s essential to flag false narratives as well as familiar stories that are purposefully altered to drive us apart—or worse.

The stories we tell matter.

Image: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Double portrait, 1843, after Ludwig Emil Grimm, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This post is about history-making events, but it’s not about fiction. I don’t typically write about politics here, but after this Sunday’s MAGA Trump Rally in New York, I feel compelled to share a short, gripping 2018 video by Marshall Curry, A Night at The Garden.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve heard the comparisons between last Sunday’s hate-spewing event at Madison Square Garden and the pro-Nazi rally at MSG on February 20, 1939. More than 20,000 people attended back then, about the same as the MAGA crowd on Sunday. The 1939 rally was billed as a celebration of Washington’s Birthday, but the message could not have been more antithetical to the values that Washington stood for.

I encourage you to watch Curry’s mini documentary, both for its historical resonance, as well as to consider his skillful storytelling. There is no narration. He weaves together visuals and ambient sound with key excerpts from German American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn’s speech. The crowd’s reactions are as essential to the narrative as the words. The video is an outstanding example of “less is more.”

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On Curry’s website about the 7-minute documentary, he gives background for the event, how and why he made the video, his editorial choices, and more about Isadore Greenbaum, the man who ran onto the stage and tried to protest.

When Greenbaum was asked, years later, why he took that risk, he answered, “Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place?”

It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves right now. Election Day is in six days. Please vote.

All too often during the day, I am present, but not. At one level, I’m paying attention to what’s around me (an essential skill when driving). But at the same time, I’m elsewhere, problem solving, story spinning, thinking of events past and what might happen next.

Our thoughts are not linear. We often experience the present moment while our minds are traveling backwards and forwards in time. But words and sentences and paragraphs and pages, by their nature, follow a linear sequence. How, then, to tell a narrative that is not linear, within a linear format?

I'm certainly not the first, nor will I be the last writer to confront this conundrum—especially in historical fiction, which, by definition, is set in the past. But here is how I solved it (or attempted to, as the reader will judge) for my World War I novel, Line of Flight.

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I wrote the first few drafts as a personal journal, a travel diary that my protagonist, Simone Levitsky, keeps on her journey to find her estranged daughter, Camilla, who has run off with her beau to volunteer for the French ambulance corps in 1915. That structure was based on a straight chronology of events, even as it included past memories that embellished the plot. But I realized, several years into the process, that I was stuck. The format was too rigid. I had to come up with almost daily events and observations, even as that pacing might not serve the story well.

So I changed course, reconceptualizing the novel as a long letter written by Simone to Camilla's daughter, Zoé, about her journey to bring Camilla home. This enabled me to more freely explore Simone's memories as well as her insights gained years after the events, deepening her character. In earlier drafts, I had created a story-within-a-story of found letters from Camilla to her lover. Working them into the journal format was a bit forced. Here, I was able to integrate them more seamlessly.

But I needed another layer. What was Simone's relationship to Zoé, and how did that inform her reflections about Camilla, as well as memories of her own mother? This evolved into a series of vignettes interspersed throughout the novel that capture what's happening in the present moment between grandmother and granddaughter. Juxtaposed with Simone's recollections, the vignettes serve to reveal her immediate emotional state as well as how she has evolved.

In so doing, I have tried to create a more immediate sense of how Simone's mind works, how she jumps from present to past to future and back again, not necessarily in that order. I have tried to build her understanding of her life in layers that reveal themselves when, and only when, she is ready to acknowledge her own truths. To the extent that any of us can do so.

We are all time travelers, whether or not we acknowledge it. Capturing the essence of that lived experience is the novelist's eternal challenge.

Image: Alex Guillaume

You can travel the world on the internet, but you can only go so far.

About nine months into writing the first draft of Line of Flight, including a 20,000-word false start, I realized that I needed to see and feel the landscapes that existed only in my imagination. Books and online research were my foundation, but there was no substitute for actually walking the ways that my characters had tread a century earlier.

With my husband, I set out in July 2015 with an aggressive itinerary, a scavenger hunt across five countries in 16 days for detail and nuance. World War I battlefields were my top priority. Although Line of Flight takes place largely behind the front lines, I needed to walk the trenches, to sense, albeit superficially, what soldiers must have felt in those claustrophobic, hellish places. I did not yet know how this would find its way into my plot, only that the trauma of trench warfare seeped into every aspect of daily life during the War.

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The Vosges Mountains in Alsace, France, where some of the fiercest battles for high ground along the Western Front were fought, are now green with second-growth forests. But the once-denuded peaks still bear imprints of violence. On the trail up Hartmannswillerkopf (HWK), also known as the Vieil Armand, we walked past fern-filled shell craters. Beautiful views at the peak belied the brutality of combat. Rusted concertina wire, crumbling trenches and dugouts hinted at the grim, cold world that troops endured on a mountaintop that switched sides back and forth over more than two years of fighting, from December 1914 to January 1916. Seven thousand French and German troops died.

At Le Linge, site of one of the War's bloodiest battles in 1915, the trenches are still sturdy, three lines deep. They are also narrow. At some points I had to squeeze through the passageway. The masonry fortification was built by the Germans to keep the French from taking Colmar, 14 miles to the east, part of Alsace that Germany had claimed in the Franco-Prussian War 45 years earlier. Here, shells, machine guns, gas, and flamethrowers slaughtered 17,000 troops on both sides and decimated the forest. We saw signs marking the advance of French troops—only a few meters from the German lines. As we traced soldiers' footsteps, children skipped along the tops of stone trenches, their parents nearby.

There is a museum at Le Linge that tells the story of the battle for the mountaintop that raged from July 20 to October 15. It includes photos and maps and uniforms and weapons. But the most poignant display cases held personal belongings of the soldiers who fought and died there a century ago. A pair of binoculars. A pocket watch. A hair comb.

At both Vosges battlefields, there are graves. Black-and-white crosses dot the ground between the trenches at Le Linge; a golden monument and rows upon rows of crosses commemorate the dead at HWK. But these mark only a fraction of those who died.

We left quietly, deeply moved, sobered.  The emotional impact of that day settled into my subconscious. Back home, over the next few years as I wrote, it seeped out onto the page. HWK found its way into the story. I can only hope that I did justice to those who fought and died there.

For me, writing is musical. It's also a quest for precision. How to channel the images and feelings in my mind and heart into words that resonate for the reader?

Metaphor is one way to get there, through the back door of memory. Emotional associations with a sound, a smell, a sight or taste or touch provide the key. But what if the metaphor references experiences beyond the reader's world? If the imagery is precise, trust the reader’s empathy and imagination.

One of the most powerful metaphors that I found while writing Line of Flight was the plight of the passenger pigeon (not to be confused with carrier pigeons, which play a different, significant role in my novel). When Simone first speaks with Colin Rockwell, a British ornithologist and fellow traveler on the Lusitania, he describes how he is returning to London from the States after studying the extinction of what had once been the most prevalent bird species on the continent:

He explained, with great passion, how these birds, which once numbered in the billions in North America, are now no more. The last known passenger pigeon died on September 1, 1914, the day he departed for the States. They would travel in huge flocks, arriving like a massive, dark cloud in fields or forests, in search of food and nesting grounds. People would run for cover, fearing a biblical plague.

“But how could they simply vanish?”

“They were hunted to extinction.”

He shook his head, overcome by his story. “Please forgive me, Mrs. Levitsky, but Homo sapiens’ capacity for destruction is unparalleled in Nature. When I left London to pursue my research in your country, I had no idea that I would return to a homeland still at war, with millions dead and wounded, and no end in sight.”

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No one alive today can recall the overwhelming arrival of a flock of millions of passenger pigeons—or the profound silence of their absence. Our concept of a flock of birds in the 21st century has no parallel. I have read extraordinary descriptions. In an earlier draft of my novel, I went into more detail, how the birds would blacken the sky like an arriving storm, with a roar louder than the Lusitania's engines and a choking stench of excrement.

In the May-June 2014 issue of Audubon, dedicated to the centenary of the passenger pigeon's extinction, contributor Barry Yeoman cites the 1895 recollections of Potawatomi tribal leader Simon Pokagon:

Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would "pour its living mass" hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. "I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America," he wrote, "yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven."

The story of the passenger pigeons' demise is gut-wrenching. With the arrival of railroads and the messaging speed of telegraphs, hunting tasty passenger pigeons became a booming commercial industry. Yeoman writes:

The professionals and amateurs together outflocked their quarry with brute force. They shot the pigeons and trapped them with nets, torched their roosts, and asphyxiated them with burning sulfur. They attacked the birds with rakes, pitchforks, and potatoes. They poisoned them with whiskey-soaked corn. Learning of some of these methods, Potawatomi leader Pokagon despaired. "These outlaws to all moral sense would touch a lighted match to the bark of the tree at the base, when with a flash—more like an explosion—the blast would reach every limb of the tree," he wrote of an 1880 massacre, describing how the scorched adults would fell and the squabs would "burst open upon hitting the ground."

All of this was in my mind and heart when I wrote Colin's words. I could think of no better metaphor for the horrific death and destruction that was World War I. Will a modern reader fully grasp the metaphor without a historical point of reference? Impossible to know. I can only hope that it resonates, how the wanton destruction of billions of birds for profit wiped an entire species off the face of the Earth, how the impulse to destroy for power and glory then, as now, threatens all existence.

Image: Vizetelly

For anything I've ever written, be it fiction or non-fiction, my favorite research is always sifting through primary sources. There is something about reading materials that are unfiltered by someone else's editorial judgment, in their original form, that gives me chills, as if I'm connecting across time and space to another person's soul.

My research for Line of Flight led me to just such a close encounter in the New York Public Library's lion-guarded main branch, which houses the 1915-1919 records of the American Fund for French Wounded. Founded by American women living abroad to aid small French hospitals serving wounded troops during WWI, the AFFW maintained its U.S. office in New York City—hence, the location of the archive (although other records are housed at Yale).

My protagonist, Simone Levitsky, ends up volunteering for the AFFW as a way to search for her daughter, Camilla, along the Western Front. I wanted to know what those volunteers saw and felt on their delivery routes, providing medical assistance to wounded soldiers and civilians.

So, back in August 2016, I spent hours in a book-lined research room at the NYPL, pouring through boxes of correspondence, written on well-worn typewriters, corrected by hand. It was quite the treasure trove. Back then, people wrote wonderful, detailed, eye-witness accounts of their travels, dinners, conversations, and general observations of life in France.

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To give you a taste, here are excerpts from a letter by A. Schuyler van Rensselaer, president of the New York branch, to volunteers at the AFFW's Paris Depot, about her experience as nurse in charge of the Motor-Van Canteen at the Chalons-sur-Marne Railroad Station, July 1, 1916. (The original is 3½ single-spaced, typed pages):

Our task consists in serving the soldiers. We aid those who cannot help themselves to food or drink—so many of them are wounded in both hands or both arms or, their heads envelopped [sic] in bandages, are unable to see! We guide their movements, lift them up, support them, and under their heads, which lie too low and which rest, for want of something better on their caps stuffed with hard objects, slip little pillows until they say with a sigh of relief: "Ah, that is much better, thank you!" These little pillows, of which you have been good enough to send us great numbers, are the manna of the sanitary trains. . . .

After serving the men with their food we give them cigarettes. We put socks on their bare feet, and slippers of felt or lamb's wool. Everything of the sort that you have so generously given us is disposed of to the very last article. Many of the men have had their feet frozen, and we often relieve them by replacing their heavy marching shoes with these soft warm slippers. We also examine the bandages and dressings and call the attention of the surgeon of the train to those that have become blood-stained or are too tightly bound, and also to such patients as are in delirium or seem to us to be growing worse. And we try to calm the insane, for the bursting of a shell sometimes produces a total or partial impairment of the brain.

The deep voice of the guns almost always accompanies us on our journeys. The chasing of aeroplanes is a daily distraction; by preference they fly over the railroad stations in order to attack provision trains or troop trains. The Zeppelin of Revigny fell quite close to one of our vans; some of our lines are bombarded every day, and sometimes, by accident, an ammunition wagon blows up near our own, which we never leave.

Day and night we live in the tumult of the railroad stations, but one soon grows accustomed to these noises, unknown in the ordinary course of life; we even love them because they secure for us the joy and the honor of aiding our soldiers in their sufferings. . . .

There were many more letters that I read and photographed, to record appearance and mood of wounded soldiers, the state of medical care, inventories of items that the AFFW distributed, how small and mid-sized hospitals looked and smelled, as well as the voices of the authors and how they filtered what they saw through their own values and prejudices. As essential as these details were to building the world of my novel, however, the cadence of correspondents' words influenced me most of all, and found its way into how Simone tells her story.

Historical fiction novelists in the future will undoubtedly scour Facebook posts, X feeds, and TikTok videos to create their own characters and stories about our fraught times. But give me an old-fashioned letter, any day, to delve into past lives.

Image: "American Fund for French Wounded" poster, (Paris: Herbert Clarke, ca.1917), Library of Congress.

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When I write, I hear music. In the words, that is. Some writers play favorite music in the background while writing. I don't. It distracts me from hearing melodies as they emerge from the page.

I can trace my awareness of word rhythms to the beginning of my professional writing career decades ago, in public radio. I was a producer/reporter, first covering the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield, later working as a news director for a new NPR affiliate in Worcester, Mass., then reporting in-depth series for a consortium of NPR stations in Massachusetts and New York. Over those five years, I learned to think and write in terms of sound. Radio scripts are, by definition, aural. You have to read your words out loud. If they trip your tongue, it's time to revise.

After my public radio stint, I switched to print journalism. I also began teaching feature writing at Clark University. When you teach, you must decipher how you do what you do, so you can explain it to your students. Before, I had simply relied on my ear. That was no longer good enough. Teaching writing, I had to articulate what was intuitive, which had the added, unexpected benefit of learning to refine my own approach to sentences. I became more aware and intentional about varying length, using precise diction, where to place what, when to break rules.

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While writing Line of Flight, I discovered Virginia Tufte's magnificent Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, which gives thousands of examples of how different sentence structures affect meaning and sound. In the midst of final rounds of revisions, before going to sleep, I would read a few pages of Tufte and let her lessons incubate overnight. When I returned to the computer the next day, inevitably some of her wisdom would filter into my editing decisions, to the manuscript's betterment.

I also learned from Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Not all his sentences are short, but they appear on the page as free verse, broken into phrases. Know what your sentences actually say is his mantra. To do so, begin with short sentences. Cut all the excess. And: "Pay attention to rhythm, first and last."

To find that excess, to ensure that my sentences in Line of Flight meant what I intended, to revise and revise and revise the rhythms, I reworked one later draft by reading the entire manuscript aloud. Even as I always hear my sentences in my head, that process was essential to getting the music right.

Writing well is never straightforward. Squeezing a first draft out of your heart and mind, for me, is both an elating journey of discovery and a struggle that I'll find a dozen excuses to avoid. Revision is my favorite part of the process, uncovering the story I want to tell, ensuring the sentences say exactly what I mean. The final pass, making wordsong, is pure joy.

There are as many ways to write a novel as there are authors, but all tend to fall somewhere on the continuum between two poles. There are the writers who meticulously plot their stories and know exactly which scene they will work on each day. And there are those who follow the faint beam of their penlight through the murk.

I lean more toward the penlight camp, although I do work out a general plot line at the beginning of a project. For both Line of Flight and my current novel-in-progress, I drew a large W on a piece of art board and wrote scene ideas on sticky notes to track the fall and rise and fall and rise of the plot.

Then I started writing and ditched at least half of what I’d plotted. Other characters emerged. New scenes evolved. The story got much more complicated.

None of this can be anticipated, at least, for me. I can only see so far when I plot, and then the plot becomes stale as I discover what the characters really want to do.

For both novels, one complete and one still a hot mess, my process led to false starts. I wrote about 20,000 words of Line of Flight before realizing it was the wrong story, and that the story I wanted to tell took place elsewhere with only two of the original characters. But one character that actually plays a very important role in the final manuscript emerged from that false start—an enigmatic carrier pigeon. Without the false start, I never would have found her.

Which brings me to the hot mess, my novel set in Weimar Germany. I realized a few months ago that, despite writing about 70,000 words in the course of nearly two years, I was not telling the story I wanted to tell. I’d had an inkling that I was on the wrong track a year ago in March, after returning from a research trip to Germany that caused me to question my approach. But after taking a short pause, I decided to keep going.

That is, until this February, when I ground to a halt. Much as I liked what I’d written so far, it was just the wrong story. I needed to take a pause. Maybe a couple of months, I thought. It’s now four, and counting.

During that time, I’ve re-immersed myself in novels, films, art, and history of the period. I viewed German Expressionist art at Yale and at the Neue Galerie in New York. I took notes as I watched Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 TV serialization of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I’m currently reading Thomas Mann’s magnificent The Magic Mountain.

I don’t consider any of this effort a waste of time, not the years spent writing up to this point or the months since. I’ve created a lot of good material, and however the story evolves, what I’ve written so far will inform what comes next.

Casting a wide net for inspiration, I stumbled last week across a very different source, Lynda Barry’s graphic memoir and writing guidebook, What It Is. Through a series of wonderful collages, Barry asks some profound questions about imagery, memory, and stories, as she recounts her stultified childhood, how books and drawing were her life-raft.

She advocates for writing by hand and keeping the pen or pencil always moving across the page, to find the stories or images that feel genuine. If you get stuck, she advises, doodle or write the alphabet, just keep your hand moving. I find this fascinating, because in the course of writing the hot mess, I realized that my ideas flow more fluidly and authentically when I write by hand.

She also advises not looking at what you’ve written for at least a week. This is harder. I’m a compulsive editor of my own writing, and my practice has been to enter my hand-written scenes into my Scrivener file once I’m done—and tweak them.

So, much to consider. There is something about this hot mess than needs me to dig much deeper into my subconscious for the real story to emerge. For which Barry has a wonderful quote. The goal (I’m doing my best to convey how she writes this in both print and cursive handwriting):

“TO BE ABLE TO STAND NOT KNOWING long ENOUGH to LET something ALIVE TAKE SHAPE!”

I wrote these wise words on a yellow sticky note that I stuck to my computer. And that is now my motto, for as long as it takes, to get the story right.

Image by Casey Horner

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