Blog 4

Hirschfeld's Friends (Quaestor2000) by Michael Dean is now available for order at Amazon,  the Book Depository or at bookshops.  It is set in Amsterdam during the early years of the Nazi occupation,  and,  like my first novel, The Crooked Cross,  it's about the moral choices involved in fighting evil.  The publishers have given it a stark white and black cover, with orange facings, which I think suits the theme well.

Let me know what you think ...

Blog 3

Hirschfeld's Friends (Quaestor2000) by Michael Dean is coming soon.  It can be pre-ordered on Amazon.co.uk - or Amazon.com will notify you when it is published.   

Hirschfeld's Friends,  my second novel,  is about Hans-Max Hirschfeld,  the Secretary General for Economic Affairs during the Nazi occupation of Holland.  He was a Jew and the Nazis knew that. 

His story is counterpointed with a fictional nephew in the Dutch resistance.  The nephew is involved in resisting the Nazi attack on Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter in 1941,  an event which led to the only strike against the Nazis,  by the civilian population of Amsterdam - an event commemorated in Holland every February.

Blog 2

August 2009:  The Crooked Cross is in The People's Book Prize

You can vote for it on:  www.peoplesbookprize.com

Blog 1

     The Crooked Cross, my novel set in Munich in the early 1930s, is published by Quaestor2000 on May 29th 2009.  It's about Hitler, the resistance to Hitler and German Expressionist art. 

     Reviews: 

    I recommend that every student of history read it. - John B Willett  Charles William Eliot Professor,  Harvard University Graduate School of Education

     Forget Dan Brown. This is real art history, real conspiracy, and really relevant.  - Alan Posener, Korrespondent fuer Politik und Gesellschaft,  Welt am Sonntag, Berlin 

    ...convincing, absorbing and revealing - Katherine Taylor, Munich Found

    This is a wonderful reading experience, not to be rushed. - Michael Carson, novelist and award-winning short-story writer 

  The starting point for the novel was the desire to write a novel.  This has been with me all my adult life, but it was getting stronger.  It was also getting more focussed.  For some time I did not know what I wanted to write about.  Then suddenly I had ideas for five unconnected novels, in order.  I wrote them all down, on a scrap of paper.  I had a Ten Year Plan.  Even Lenin only had a Five Year Plan.  I was more organised than Lenin.  Not.

   Actually, to some extent, I did know what I wanted to write about.  There had always been flickerings in me of writing about real people.  When I was seventeen, I started a novel about Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth century false messiah.  Much later there was an attempt at a novel about Stephen Ward, the 1960s society osteopath who was deeply involved in the Christine Keeler affair.  Then there was a play, The Ark Mutiny, about Noah.  It remains unproduced, but I used it as my 'audition piece' with Granada TV.  One of their producers, Howard Baker, liked it, and it got me the commission to do a play in the Crown Court series. (see the Author Bio in Home)

     My unconscious, or subconscious, or psyche, or whatever, was trying to tell me something.  At any rate all the novels in the Ten Year Plan are about real people.  The Crooked Cross was number one on the list.  I recently heard that Quaestor2000 are going to publish novel two.  I'm currently reading for novel three.  I seriously adore the reading.  If I didn't really want to know and, more, to understand, I wouldn't do the novel.

   So why a novel about Hitler?  It's what came into my head.  I wanted to understand both the individual and the society where he flourished - early 1930s Munich, which of course is another world from Munich today. 

    I wanted to pay tribute to German democracy and the resistance to Hitler in the early days - the so-called 'first-phase' of the twelve-year Nazi Reich.  The heroic Otto Wels is hardly known outside Germany.  His speech opposing the Enabling Act, by which Hitler gave himself dictatorial powers, is a dusty footnote.  I think it should rank with the Gettysburg Address.  There's more on the speech in Deleted Scene 2 in Deleted Scenes. 

   Also, I love art, especially the German Expressionists.  The Nazis declared war on them.  Both the living - Kirchner, Beckmann (both alive in 1933) and the dead (Marc and Macke, killed in the First World War.)  As a homage, there are Expressionist and New Realist paintings woven into the text of the novel.  The description of Ello when we first meet her is a Kirchner painting, Marzella.  The description of Sauer is by Lovis Corinth  (Self Portrait, 1896).  The street scene described when Glaser goes to investigate the murder of Weintraub is by Otto Dix  (Matchseller 1920).  There are others. 

    Between 1933 and 1939, Hitler made thirteen major public speeches solely or mainly about art.  (see the essay Hitler as Artist in Essays).  Art was as central to his world-view as race - arguably more so.  But why attack the Expressionists - an art  movement started by the Nordic Munch, and mainly German?  Because the world they painted and the way they painted was different.

    To me, the 'ideology' of Nazi Race Theory was conformism taken to the extreme of insanity.  Why does homo sapiens need the reinforcement of seeking out those similar to us, and attacking those we perceive as different?  How are those perceived as different identified as such?  What mechanisms are used to attack them?

   I don't have any answers, but I wish to spend the rest of my life investigating the questions, in fictional form.

    The starting point for my story - the plot -  was what I believe to be Hitler's murder of his half-niece, Geli Raubal, (see the Prologue and Did Hitler Kill Hitler Geli Raubal? in Essays)

    Then I had to balance the demands of plot and doing justice to the issues outlined above.  Deleted Scene 1 encapsulates the sort of decisions I had to make:  The scene shows the murdered art dealer Weintraub's sister having to leave Germany in 1933.  It illustrates a little-known paradox, namely that despite their desire to see the Jews out of Germany, Nazi bureaucracy actually made it quite difficult for them to leave legally.  The scene illuminates the main character, and the two most important subsidiary characters.  I liked it.  I still like it.  But it had to go, because it was off the main line of the plot.