This large and ambitious novel is timely, given the apparent rise in popularity of extremist political parties throughout Europe. Lucy Beckett sets her story in inter-war Germany. She shows, painstakingly, how Nazism spread its poisonous roots in the fertile soil of a disrupted, demoralised and divided country, and how those who refused to accept its doctrine were turned into aliens within their own homeland.
In 1961, Max Hofmann, a violin teacher, is dying in London, where he has lived in safe but empty exile. He was once Max von Hofmannswaldau, a Prussian aristocrat and an intellectual lawyer. On his deathbed he charges his favourite pupil, a girl of 17, to uncover his story and that of his friends. He gives her a postcard with seven names on it, the last name his own. ‘Hitler killed all of us’, he tells her, ‘Or Stalin.
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