I do like a novel that as well as
being a good story teaches me something. Berlin Love Song does just that, putting life
into what must have been a huge research task in order to show what happened in
what’s been called ‘the forgotten Holocaust’ of Germany’s Romani people.
But this story does more than show
the experience of one Gypsy family, and one teenage trapeze artist, Lily, in
particular. It counterpoints Lily's experience of life and death in Second World War Germany with that of her lover
Max, a teenage boy from a rich Berlin family whose members all react differently to the demands
that Hitler’s government puts on them. Max isn’t much interested in politics, but finds himself having to
become a member of the Hitler Youth movement, and then a member of the SS in
the dying days of the war. Both Lily's and Max's points of view give us a fresh alternative to the usual British point of view
we experience when reading about World War Two, and that in itself gives great food for thought.
This all sounds grim, and of course
much of what we experience in the story is, but the story starts with the aged Max
looking back to his teenage romance to tell the story of both those characters
and their families, so we know from the start that at least he survived. We also have the
wonderfully colourful life of the circus performer Romanies pre-internment, we have the romance
of the love story to carry us through, and a positive and hopeful ending is
achieved (but I’m not going to give it away!).
In order to keep the story moving,
Sarah Matthias has resisted stopping to explain things as we go, so the story
assumes a certain knowledge of what concentration camps are and how these Nazi ones
worked, what Doctor Mengele really did, as well as the experience to understand
from the clues given that Lily and Max have made love.
For most of the story, Max and Lily
are in different locations, and so the story is told first person by each of
them in short chapters that jump from one to the other. We never lose sight of either character for
long, so the story flows well once the contrivance of the old man at the
beginning is passed. So many characters
and such a lot of complex history, this is a great achievement!
Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE
5 comments:
I really liked your article and the photo is super. Thanks you.
Thank you for these posts and links, I will definitely look at your site.
Hello, I would like to thank you for sharing this useful material. The information you have mentioned here will be useful. I would like to share with you all one useful source https://writessay.org/ which might be useful for you as well.
This article is great! I am a huge classic and retro-style music lover myself. If someone wishes to create an article similar to this one, you may find the tips here https://pro-papers.com/blog/writing-about-music very useful. It helped me significantly with my essay a couple of weeks ago.
It's so cool to find someone who thinks like me. I also like this novel and also think that this good story teaches me. Only after it I decided to write 300 essay topics and to improve my writing skills with it))
Post a Comment