The Challenge of Being a Serious Historical Novelist

The Challenge of Being a Serious Historical Novelist: An Interview with Lucy Beckett, Author of A Postcard From the Volcano: A Novel of Pre-War Germany | Carl E. Olson | April 24, 2009 | Ignatius Insight

Ignatius Insight: What was the inspiration for your novel and its main character, Max von Hofmannswaldau?

Lucy Beckett: The inspiration for my novel was complicated. When I was at school in the 1950s some of my most interesting teachers were, one way and another, still  recovering from the consequences of Hitler's regime and the war. I was taught music, German and Greek by a German refugee from a Junker family in Silesia who had left home for England in the 1930s because he couldn't bear the Nazi government and what it was doing to his country. He died when I was 18 and I never discovered much about his past. I have been interested ever since in the project of imagining his life at home, in a part of Germany that was ravaged by the war—his university city of Breslau, now Wroclaw, was ruined by the Russians in 1945 because the Germans, already beaten, used it in vain as a last stronghold. Secondly, my mother's family has German-Jewish roots and I wanted to explore the different kinds of Jewishness still flourishing in Germany east of the Elbe before Hitler came to power.

Ignatius Insight: The novel opens in 1914 and concludes at the end of the second World War. What attracted you to that era? What sort of research was necessary to write about it?

Read the entire interview...

Comments

[Ed Peters]

"The novel opens in 1914 and concludes at the end of the second World War."

In Dan Brown's world: 1914 was the year the Japanese bombed Honolulu in retaliation for American aggresion against Japan's allies, Cananda and China. Woodrow Wilson, unable to convince Churchill of the folly of nuclear retaliation, became a monk of Opus Dei and .... etc etc.

[Vince]

Her novel THE TIME BEFORE YOU DIE, set during the English Reformation, is excellent.

Sadly, I think its also out of print. Perhaps there are a few copies still floating around the cavernous IP warehouses in Colorado.

[Sandra Miesel]

Edith Stein was from Breslau, received an amazingly rigorous classical education, and interrupted her studies to serve as a military nurse during WWI.

[Brian J. Schuettler]

I was rather surprised that Lucy Beckett could not name any of the so many great Catholic writers currently writing and publishing.