Rating 5⭐s
You can buy The Gathering Storm..here You can find out more about Alan Jones...here
The Blurb...
The Gathering Storm: Book 1 in the Sturmtaucher Trilogy, a powerful and compelling story of two families torn apart by evil.
Kiel, Northern Germany, 1933. A naval city, the base for the German Baltic fleet, and the centre for German sailing, the venue for the upcoming Olympic regatta in 1936.
The Kästners, a prominent Military family, are part of the fabric of the city, and its social, naval and yachting circles. The Nussbaums are the second generation of their family to be in service with the Kästners as domestic staff, but the two households have a closer bond than most.
As Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party claw their way to power in 1933, life has never looked better for families like the Kästners. There is only one problem.
The Nussbaums are Jews.
The Sturmtaucher Trilogy documents the devastating effect on both families of the Nazis’ hateful ideology and the insidious erosion of the rights of Germany's Jews.
When Germany descends ever deeper into dictatorship, General Erich Kästner tries desperately to protect his employees, and to spirit them to safety.
As the country tears itself apart, the darkness which envelops a nation threatens not only to destroy two families, but to plunge an entire continent into war.’
Our Review...
This is a heart rending cautionary tale of politics gone wrong. It tells the tale of Eric (played in my head by Curt Jurgens!) and Yosef. Childhood friends who saw out the first world war in action together. Now Erich is a General working for German military intelligence and Yosef is his domestic help/driver. However its 1933 in Kiel. Yosef and his family are jewish but not fervently so. This is the first part of a trilogy that encompasses 1933-1945 in total.
We meet both sets of families. Erich's two sons progress from the compulsory Hitler Youth into the Army. Franz honourable and thoughtful like his father, Johann a womanising hot head. We also meet Erich's wife Maria, desperate to be a leading socialite and accepted by the aristocracy. To this end she is seeking a high society match for her oldest daughter.
Yosef's family is less aspirational. His wife is the Kastner's cook. They along with their children live with them in a small servants house on the Kastner's estate.
So now the scene is set we follow the slow, inexorable rising tide of the nazi party. With each new law, diktat and convention the pressure builds a little more. Step by small step the tension continually ramps up. until it is unbearable. Yosef's family's freedoms and rights are eroded, the thugs both in brown/black shirts and in civilian garb get a little louder and a little closer. How can Yosef protect them without being taken to the camps as a criminal. What can Erich do with being denounced as a traitor.
This is in part a epistolary novel. The writer is very clever in using telegrams between military intelligence departments and letters between Jewish friends to increase the temperature without telling you that he is increasing the temperature dial.
Often you see two questions posed about WW2 and the nazis.
1. How did the German people just go along with the race hatred policies of the nazis?
2. Why didn't the Jewish population do something about it?
If you read this book, it transfers into you by osmosis into the feel of the time and place, you will understand how both these situations occurred. And it is truly horrific and a scenario that one can see playing out around us in populist politics today.
Any negative things about this book? It felt heavy, serious and important. Although given the subject matter there was no way around this. It was never going to be rainbows and lollipops although perhaps it could have been a little shorter.
However this does not deflect from an excellent book. You really feel for the characters and it's heartbreaking that you now whats coming while they don't.
Like being with a friend who you know has a terminal illness but he is oblivious to it.. This book should be studied in schools in History or English classes to see how media manipulation can lead to societal control. Read this as history and then read 1984 to see the next evolution.
The research is amazing and the reader would do well to read the appendages to appreciate this mammoth 5 year undertaking.
This is a tour de force and I can give it no higher praise than to say it could be a "Schindler's List" prequel.
Selected Quotes...
The thing is, Yosef, people are disillusioned. Unemployment is soaring, living conditions are worse than ever and our politicians are indecisive and do nothing but bicker and prevaricate. We are being bled dry and treated as pariahs by the rest of the world and our armed forces are emasculated. Is it any wonder that people see him as some sort of saviour?’
We went from a democracy to a dictatorship in a few short months, without so much as a whimper.’ ‘Because deep down, the German people don’t really like us, and if we’re the price they pay for putting Germany back on the world stage, they’ll give him anything.’
He paused again, looking around at the faces of people desperate for guidance, both temporal and spiritual. ‘I am leaving Germany with reluctance because, until recently, I regarded myself as German, and I loved this country. If it were just our leaders who were trying to impose their anti-Semitic views on the nation, I could live with that. But the German people; not all of them, but a significant proportion of them, are embracing those views and, in my view, it can only get worse.’
She gave him a worried smile. ‘You too? It’s getting to the stage when I think everyone is looking at me.’ ‘Maybe we’re just overthinking it all. Surely everyone hasn’t become Jew-haters overnight?’ ‘Maybe they’ve always hated us, but only now do they feel they can show it.’
the alcohol slowly glued the group together, and loosened their tongues,
wasn’t the National Socialists or the government who threw the bricks and lit the fires of Kristallnacht, although they stood back and let it happen. It was the German people who smashed and burned our homes, shops and synagogues.’
Memo: Geh.KdoS. ABW 31/08/39 CAC0842.1 For Attention Only: General Erich Kästner, Abwehr, Kiel office, Abwehr. From: Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Chef der Abwer
The British fleet has mobilised; all leave has been cancelled and all naval ships have been made ready to go to sea. [END]
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About the author...
Alan Jones is a Scottish author with three gritty crime stories to his name, the first two set in Glasgow, the third one based in London. He has now switched genres, and his WW2 trilogy was published in the second half of 2021. It is a Holocaust story set in Northern Germany. He is married with four grown up children and six wonderful grandchildren.
He retired in 2020 as a mixed-practice vet in a small Scottish coastal town in Ayrshire and is one of the RNLI volunteer coxswains on the local lifeboat. He makes furniture in his spare time, and maintains and sails a 45-year-old yacht in the Irish Sea and on the beautiful west coast of Scotland. He loves reading, watching films and cooking. He still plays football despite being just the wrong side of sixty.
His crime novels are not for the faint-hearted, with some strong language, violence, and various degrees of sexual content. The first two books also contain a fair smattering of Glasgow slang.
He is one of the few self-published authors to be given a panel at Bloody Scotland and has done two pop-up book launches at the festival in Stirling.
He spent five years researching and writing the Sturmtaucher Trilogy.
