I had featured Christoph Fischer's Trilogy on this blog before; as well as having shown his four-legged family of Labradoodles on Pasha's blog.
Today, Christoph has opened up with a question that he has asked himself:"How autobiographical are my stories?"
In the following article - reblogged from his website - he allows us glimpses about the people behind his novels.
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Here are some pictures that might give some insight into my world and the stories behind my stories.
This is my paternal grandmother, Gertha / Greta Adam. She divorced my grandfather in 1933, the year my father was born. He never saw his older sister, who remained with my grandfather, until in the late 1970s. They were living in East Germany while my grandmother, her sister Vilma and my father lived in Bavaria, in the West.
Gertha/ Greta and her sister Vilma’s story between 1933 and 1946 is a huge part of THE LUCK OF THE WEISSENSTEINERS, although their exact story was quite different from that of the Weissensteiners in my book.
The two and their kind-hearted nature were the basis for the characters who I named after them.
This is my paternal grandfather and his Trabant. I sadly never met him but my aunt told me a lot of good things about him when I met her in 1989 (just before the wall came down). He had an amputated leg – not war related – and was a gentle soul, a librarian and book lover. Why my grandparents divorced was never explained to us children. My aunt thought it was to do with money for the family business, but nobody who knows is still alive. Two of my books play out divorce scenarios that could befit their story – seen from different sides. My grandfather and his (imagined/ projected) character heavily influenced the figure of Jonah Weissensteiner. Jonah is how I imagined my grandfather to have been and how my aunt described him. The story of his amputation is the basis for Sebastian, and a lot of the other ‘cold’ facts about his life have influenced the story line of SEBASTIAN.
(A "Trabant" was the ubiquitous East German two-cylinder car)
This is the mighty alpine landscape that was the backdrop for my childhood. Typical for my upbringing was also the mighty Catholic church, which punished me with masses, confessions and terrible guilt trips because I just did not believe as I was told. [Not that I was forced to do anything other than to go to church by my mother - I hasten to add] Mundane things seemed more important to me than religion at the time and I disagreed that it would have to be the most important thing in my life. Rebel that I was I stopped going anyway, so no harm done.
Our wider family had a farm with a restaurant business attached. It was central to the people of the generations above us and many a yarn was spun about its owners and the people who wanted to inherit it. THE BLACK EAGLE INN is heavily inspired by those stories, but what really happened with the family business I honestly do not know. I never met the people concerned and for the purpose of my post-war German story I had to change so much of the original script that only little of the outer sceleton is similar to the real Inn behind the book.
Above is a picture of my maternal grandparents. My grandfather died at the age of 54 due to a heart condition – something that also found its way into my books. He was a civil servant and had several children.
This is my grandmother’s offspring as seen in the 1970s.
You can see, a lot of children, hence my tendency to write large family sagas.
My grandmother Gertha / Greta with me and my siblings, early 1980s before her death. Me eating cake with a silly hat on next to my grandmother, my father walking and smiling, my mother on her way into church, a picture that reminds me of the famly business, a political poster from after the war and a family snap shot as I imagine the Black Eagle Inn lot.
The Luck of the Weissensteiners (Three Nations Trilogy Book 1)
In the sleepy town of Bratislava in 1933 a romantic girl falls for a bookseller from Berlin. Greta Weissensteiner, daughter of a Jewish weaver, slowly settles in with the Winkelmeier clan just as the developments in Germany start to make waves in Europe and re-draws the visible and invisible borders. The political climate in the multifaceted cultural jigsaw puzzle of disintegrating Czechoslovakia becomes more complex and affects relations between the couple and the families. The story follows them through the war with its predictable and also its unexpected turns and events and the equally hard times after.
But this is no ordinary romance; in fact it is not a romance at all, but a powerful, often sad, Holocaust story. What makes The Luck of the Weissensteiners so extraordinary is the chance to consider the many different people who were never in concentration camps, never in the military, yet who nonetheless had their own indelible Holocaust experiences. This is a wide-ranging, historically accurate exploration of the connections between social location, personal integrity and, as the title says, luck.
Sebastian (Three Nations Trilogy Book 2)
Sebastian is the story of a young man who has his leg amputated before World War I. When his father is drafted to the war it falls on to him to run the family grocery store in Vienna, to grow into his responsibilities, bear loss and uncertainty and hopefully find love.
Sebastian Schreiber, his extended family, their friends and the store employees experience the ‘golden days’ of pre-war Vienna and the timed of the war and the end of the Monarchy while trying to make a living and to preserve what they hold dear.
Fischer convincingly describes life in Vienna during the war, how it affected the people in an otherwise safe and prosperous location, the beginning of the end for the Monarchy, the arrival of modern thoughts and trends, the Viennese class system and the end of an era.
As in the first part of the trilogy, “The Luck of The Weissensteiners” we are confronted again with themes of identity, Nationality and borders. The step back in time made from Book 1 and the change of location from Slovakia to Austria enables the reader to see the parallels and the differences deliberately out of the sequential order. This helps to see one not as the consequence of the other, but to experience them as the momentary reality as it must have felt for the people at the time.
The Black Eagle Inn (Three Nations Trilogy Book 3)
The Black Eagle Inn is an old established Restaurant and Farm business in the sleepy Bavarian countryside outside of Heimkirchen. Childless Anna Hinterberger has fought hard to make it her own and keep it running through WWII. Religion and rivalry divide her family as one of her nephews, Markus has got her heart and another nephew, Lukas got her ear. Her husband Herbert is still missing and for the wider family life in post-war Germany also has some unexpected challenges in store.
Once again Fischer tells a family saga with war in the far background and weaves the political and religious into the personal. Being the third in the Three Nations Trilogy this book offers another perspective on war, its impact on people and the themes of nations and identity.
On Goodreads:
http://ow.ly/pAX8G
On Amazon:
http://bookshow.me/B00FSBW2L6
Short Biography:
Christoph Fischer was born in Germany, near the Austrian border, as the son of a Sudeten-German father and a Bavarian mother. Not a full local in the eyes and ears of his peers he developed an ambiguous sense of belonging and home in Bavaria. He moved to Hamburg in pursuit of his studies and to lead a life of literary indulgence. After a few years he moved on to the UK where he is still resident today. ‘The Luck of The Weissensteiners’ was published in November 2012; ‘Sebastian’ in May 2013 and The Black Eagle Inn in October 2013. He has written several other novels which are in the later stages of editing and finalisation.
