In trying to sell Reich TV at the Ad Astra Convention, I noticed readers gave all kinds of positive nods and delighted "hmmm" noises when I pointed out the afterword of the book, which offers a detailed breakdown of the actual historical facts that inspired the novel. Sure, it's an SF thriller where George Orwell runs around in 1934 Berlin, chasing Nazis, and okay, you've got cell phones, the Marx Brothers on television, social networks and early computer tech in this alternate world (oh, and there's even more), but yep, a lot of this not only could have happened but certain events really did. Honest. Would I inflict blog mendacity on you? :-)
So I thought today I'd offer some excerpt snippets from the novel's afterword to stoke a little more interest. Don't worry, there are no spoilers here, because in these sections, I discuss certain events that couldn't be included in the novel. But you may be amazed by some of the real stuff that actually went on. Here you go:
From the Afterword NO RERUNS TONIGHT: HOW MUCH OF REICH TV IS “TRUE?”
Television under the Nazis wasn’t ever called “Reich TV,” of course, but Germans of that time certainly saw the swastika emblem on the title card of the Berlin station, and Reich TV works as useful shorthand for English readers. The actual broadcasts began well after Hitler came to power. In the beginning, people did watch shows all together in TV parlors. But the Nazis fully intended to help get private sets in as many family homes as possible in much the same way they pushed radios to facilitate their propaganda purposes...
Hitler and the top Nazis were actually horrified by how they appeared on early television. They shunned the live cameras. As cameras and the process improved, it’s fascinating to compare live, unedited TV pans of Hitler in say, a motorcade, versus how Leni Riefenstahl depicted him in carefully shot and manipulated film footage...
...There was a steady stream from 1934 on of books by correspondents and activists describing conditions there, much as Barnes & Noble outlets today are full of pop journalism books on Afghanistan, Darfur and other hot spots. I started collecting such books in the late 1990s. The best include Howard K. Smith’s Last Train from Berlin, and Konrad Heiden’s The New Inquisition and Der Fuehrer. During the same time, a work of more dubious scholarship was released, The Reichstag Fire Trial.
Trial? You mean there was a trial? There certainly was...
Many of us learned from our history textbooks, “The Nazis burned down the Reichstag.” Oh, really? How do we know this? The fact is usually offered in books in one quick dash of a line, which is downright amazing, because the whole affair went on for months after the fire and captured attention on both sides of the Atlantic. The textbooks zip through this so that they can get on with mentioning—with a certain amount of justification—the abuses and grip-tightening of power under the Nazis’ Enabling Act. That’s all well and good, but if you don’t know the back story, I feel the warning from history lacks certain vital ammunition...
[The Nazis used the Reichstag fire as a pretext so they could go] after certain targets they always wanted to get their hands on, which included one German Communist and a bunch of Bulgarian Communists. They put them on trial, and here’s the truly amazing part: [most of the] defendants were acquitted.
That’s right. They were found not guilty.
The trial happened before the Nazis stuffed the courts and the justice benches with their own stooges. The trial in Leipzig heard testimony about flammable spray liquids being used, and the court even went on a little field trip to the burned-out Reichstag to inspect the revelatory tunnel. The Nazis never counted on one of the defendants, a pugnacious Bulgarian, Georgi Dimitrov, proving quite capable of mounting his own defense at the trial. He cross-examined Hermann Göring and baited him into a rage, with Hitler’s number two man jumping up and yelling, “You wait until we get you outside this court, you scoundrel!”
There were major protests in New York and in London over the fire and the trial. I mean big ones, with thousands in attendance. In the end, the Nazis refused to release [the acquitted defendants], keeping them in “protective custody.”
And the story gets even better. The Soviet Union had been watching all this time, and while it couldn’t do much for Ernst Torgler, the German Communist, it decided to throw its weight behind the Bulgarians. Let “our guys” go, Moscow told Hitler. You really don’t want to make trouble with us. Guess what? The Nazis did! They put the Bulgarians on a plane to Moscow, and Dimitrov later went on to become premier of Bulgaria...
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That's it for the excerpts, except to say we've barely scratched the surface, because there's so much more that could be said on how George Orwell acts in the novel versus his real life, the funny, astonishing truth about David Niven's duelling skills, Harpo Marx's spy career, plus the fascinating real details behind others who pop up in the book. But hopefully, this small sample will make you want to go out and get a copy.
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One last bit of shameless self-promotion. The amazing Kanaxa emailed me the other night, and I don't think she'd mind me sharing this tidbit. She designed the stunning cover for The Karma Booth, using the beautiful photography of Malena Barron, and she always expressed interest in getting herself a copy. She wrote to tell me, "I'm about 30 pages into Karma and DUDE, I had a NIGHTMARE last night. I kid you not! What did you do to meeee?! LOL"
Hey, we put it right in the blurb copy. "It’s terrifying. It’s devastating..." What, folks think that's just hard sales talk? :-D
No, no, boys and girls, The Karma Booth is intended to be reeeeaallly, really scary.
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