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The Ragged Edge of Night
Scritto da Olivia Hawker
Narrato da Olivia Hawker e Nick Sandys
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For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, and The Nightingale comes an emotionally gripping, beautifully written historical novel about extraordinary hope, redemption, and one man's search for light during the darkest times of World War II.
Germany, 1942. Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage—in name only—to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too—atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken once again by the inescapable rumble of war.
As Anton struggles to adapt to the roles of husband and father, he learns of the Red Orchestra, an underground network of resisters plotting to assassinate Hitler. Despite Elisabeth's reservations, Anton joins this army of shadows. But when the SS discovers his schemes, Anton will embark on a final act of defiance that may cost him his life—even if it means saying goodbye to the family he has come to love more than he ever believed possible.
Azioni libro
Inizia ad ascoltareInformazioni sul libro
The Ragged Edge of Night
Scritto da Olivia Hawker
Narrato da Olivia Hawker e Nick Sandys
Descrizione
For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, and The Nightingale comes an emotionally gripping, beautifully written historical novel about extraordinary hope, redemption, and one man's search for light during the darkest times of World War II.
Germany, 1942. Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage—in name only—to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too—atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken once again by the inescapable rumble of war.
As Anton struggles to adapt to the roles of husband and father, he learns of the Red Orchestra, an underground network of resisters plotting to assassinate Hitler. Despite Elisabeth's reservations, Anton joins this army of shadows. But when the SS discovers his schemes, Anton will embark on a final act of defiance that may cost him his life—even if it means saying goodbye to the family he has come to love more than he ever believed possible.
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Recensioni
Excellent story about German resistance
My understanding was that this was historical fiction in the style of All the Light We Cannot See. What I discovered in the Afterword, however, is that this story is based on the lives of real characters, and in particular, the grandfather of the author’s husband, born in 1904 in Stuttgart to a devout Catholic family.Anton Starzmann, 38, previously served as a friar who taught music to developmentally and/or physically challenged children at the St. Josefsheim school. The Nazis came, disbanded the order, took the children away, and put the men into the army as soldiers. [We later are reminded that Hitler initiated the T4 Program in 1939, a campaign to “rid the Fatherland” of such “drains” upon the economy as the disabled.] Anton thus joined the Army, but what he had to do haunted him. Then, while jumping from a plane when the army went into Riga, Anton sustained a back injury, or so he claimed, in order to avoid further service in the Wehrmacht. It was his first act of resistance.As we begin the story, almost a year has passed since Anton’s days as a friar, and he is traveling to Unterboihingen, a small village near Stuttgart. [Today, the Württemberg town of Unterboihingen has been absorbed into Wendlingen.] He had come to Unterboihingen for the surprising reason that he answered an ad by Elisabeth Hansjosten Herter, a young widow. She said she was seeking “a humble, patient man” for a husband who was willing to be a father to her three children. [You may think this a bit too contrived and predictable for a plot line, but as indicated above, it is based on actual fact.]It is clear each is reluctant to take on such a role with a stranger, but Anton is looking for redemption, and Elisabeth is looking for help. She admits she is “only seeking a husband for his money.” Elisabeth has three children: Albert, 11, Paul, 9, and Maria, 6. It is hard for her to feed and clothe them in this time of war.Elisabeth was clearly nervous, however, and Anton tried to reassure her. He told her about his back injury to imply he would not be able to be a husband in every sense, so she could relax on that score.They each took two weeks for “prayer and reflection,” and then got married.In the meantime, Anton became friends with the local priest, Father Emil. Anton went to him in anguish: he didn't know how to be a husband or a father. Emil reminded him he also has never been either:“But I think it can’t be so different from being a man of the cloth. You must be guided by integrity, mercy, and justice. You must let love carry all your decisions, all your words. . . . That is all the Lord asks - that we live by Christ’s example.”Anton agreed to play the organ for Father Emil at his church St. Kolumban on Sundays, and Father Emil helped Anton get work teaching music in order to support Elisabeth and the children. Few families could afford lessons, however, and it did not generate enough money to take care of growing children. Then Father Emil got Anton a more lucrative position, taking messages to other members of the resistance in nearby towns.Anton didn't tell Elisabeth at first because he knew it is dangerous. Even in remote Unterboihingen there was a town Gauleiter - a district leader who served as the Reich’s eyes and ears, working to promote the Nazi agenda, and threatening to report anyone who seemed the least bit disloyal. But as Anton whispered to his stepson Albert, “Herr Möbelbauer,” as the boys called the Gauleiter because of his profession as a furniture maker, “answers to his ambition, but I answer only to God.”When the Gauleiter insisted that Anton be in charge of a Hitler Youth group for the town, Anton was desperate to come up with a plan to avoid this task. Playing to the Gauleiter’s ambition, he proposed forming a town band for the boys instead, that putatively would bring even more glory to Unterboihingen and therefore to the Gauleiter himself.Anton still had the instruments he brought with him from St. Josefsheim. He believed that “music eases every pain we don’t know we carry.” It was, he declared, a balm for our hearts. Moreover, music was a common language anyone could speak together: “it’s the greatest miracle God ever wrought, for it shows us that we are one.” [Many of the Nazis loved music, including Hitler, but it was a nice theory in any event.]Time went by, and Anton developed strong feelings for Elisabeth, but “[t]wenty years of celibacy . . . left him unprepared to confront his own heart.” Yet he came to understand that he loved his wife, even though he did not think she returned his feelings. At the same time, they experienced increasing adversity and danger, much of it on account of the tyrannical power wielded by the Gauleiter. Before long they received information that the Gauleiter suspected Anton, so Anton agreed to “lie low.” But then word came that the SS were going to every small town to take away the church bells to melt down for the brass. Anton, with his love of music and his hatred of Hitler, was determined not to let that happen.Anton and Elisabeth had to confront their feelings about one another and the family they had forged together, as well as to weigh the risk of taking ethical action and possibly losing their lives, versus the psychological and spiritual cost of going along with the Nazis and losing their souls. Discussion: The author says in her Afterword that she kept notes on this family story for years, but never felt a compulsion to complete it until the election of 2016 showed her that history can repeat itself. She admonishes, “We are fools to think the past remains in the past.” She writes:“As I watched the U.S. I thought I knew devolve, seemingly overnight, into an unrecognizable landscape - a place where political pundits threw up Nazi salutes in front of news cameras, unafraid - a place where swastikas bloomed like fetid flowers on the walls of synagogues and mosques - I knew the time had come.”She inserts into her story many developments about the growth of Nazi political power that are not only historically accurate, but sound alarmingly like what is happening again now.She notes, for example, about the Nazi era:“We could have stopped them long ago, but we didn’t. We hid our faces behind our hands. We told ourselves, ‘This won’t continue. It won’t be allowed. Someone will stop them; someone must.’”But the Party quickly became thoroughly entrenched, and as for the people:“They are all too willing to shut their eyes, to pretend nothing evil has happened. . . . They are ready to believe, now, that mankind was always meant to hate his neighbor, to kill the weak and the outcast, since God first dreamed us into being.”And yet, because of what the author has seen with her husband’s family, she believes that “darkness cannot last forever. And beyond night’s edge, there is light.”Evaluation: This ironically timely book is all the more moving because so much of it really took place. The focus is mostly on Anton’s interior landscape, who, because he was a man of God for so many years, is confused and distraught that such evil has come to inhabit the world.Highly recommended.
A slow burner of a novel, telling the story of Anton Starzmann, a former Franciscan friar, strongly anti-Nazi, who moves to a small village near Stuttgart to look after a widow and her children. Once there he is recruited into the Red Orchestra, an anti-Hitler resistance movement and defies the local Gauleiter by forming a brass orchestra of local children to avoid them being recruited into the Hitler Youth. The author paints a contrasting picture of a typical German community to that conventionally painted of a Nazi complicit population, who do their best to offer passive resistance, despite the risk. As attempts on Hitler's life fail, the resisters wonder if they will ever be free of the yoke of Nazism and a moving picture is painted of the impact on ordinary Germans. The story is all the more powerful for being based on the real life of Anton Starzmann, with only minor details altered to suit the confines of a novel. At a time of increased fascist, Nazi sentiment, especially in the USA, the story is a salutary lesson of the dangers such sentiments represent.
The Ragged Edge of Night is a wonderful historical-fiction novel that ties together a slow smoldering romance with a suspenseful tall of intrigue, heroism, bravery and courage. It tells a side of WW II not often explored in so many books, the story of those within Germany who saw Hitler for the evil despot he was and dared to resist.
While popular fiction uses a broad brush to depict Germany during the war, wiser heads realize that not everyone was taken in by the Nazis and that many stood up to resist. Resisting Hitler was dangerous but necessary, just as it is when any country loses its way and becomes ruled by madmen.
The Ragged Edge of Night, based on a real story, follows the meeting and marriage of two very unlikely spouses who try to scratch out a living and protect their children in a time of desperation and danger. The story engrossed readers, reading far more like a suspense thriller than a fictionalized retelling of actual events. It is a tribute to people who respond to the morality of their hearts rather than to the fears or temptations of those around them.
The writing never waivers from excellence, articulately describing events, settings and characters, making readers feel as if they are part of the action.
I am glad I found this book and hope many, many others do, too.
While popular fiction uses a broad brush to depict Germany during the war, wiser heads realize that not everyone was taken in by the Nazis and that many stood up to resist. Resisting Hitler was dangerous but necessary, just as it is when any country loses its way and becomes ruled by madmen.
The Ragged Edge of Night, based on a real story, follows the meeting and marriage of two very unlikely spouses who try to scratch out a living and protect their children in a time of desperation and danger. The story engrossed readers, reading far more like a suspense thriller than a fictionalized retelling of actual events. It is a tribute to people who respond to the morality of their hearts rather than to the fears or temptations of those around them.
The writing never waivers from excellence, articulately describing events, settings and characters, making readers feel as if they are part of the action.
I am glad I found this book and hope many, many others do, too.
This is a fictional biography based on actual family members of the author and although some license was taken and explained, it is essentially non-fiction. It is an account of a friar who was conscripted into the Nazi military, left with an alleged bad back, and became a member of the resistance in Germany. The writing is good, the story is interesting. Although Nazi resistance stories abound, this one is worth reading.
A bit juvenile and too feel goody
Historical fiction at it's best. Full of despair and hopefulness, evil and goodness, spirituality and hate, and so many excellent characters. A microcosm of the greatness of regular people in the face of massive forces against them. Love conquers all.
One of the best books I have read this year!!! I absolutely LOVED it! My review can't possibly do it justice. The book was beautifully written. I'm pretty sure I teared up in some spots. I loved the characters, story and writing style. After reading the author's remarks at the end, I found out the book was based on a true story. This made the book even more amazing. Anton finds himself answering an ad in a Catholic paper. A widow is in need of a father for her three children. Anton was previously a Franciscan friar until his school was seized by the Nazis. He then became part of the Wehrmacht until a "back injury" gave him an excuse to leave. Now he finds himself to be a husband and father in a small village. Anton brings his love of music to the town. He would rather create a marching band than have the impressionable boys fall under Hitler's spell. Along with Father Emil, Anton joins the resistance to help with the downfall of Hitler. I loved the characters. I felt like I was right there with them. I loved getting to know Anton and Elisabeth. Enjoyed Anita's sense of humor and Maria was quite the handful. I knew that white communion dress would not survive. Each of the characters added so much to the story. Anton was an amazing person. So was Elisabeth. She was very strong woman. The scene at the school with his students was heartbreaking. One of my favorite parts was the scene with the missing bells. I definitely teared up in parts. My only complaint about the book is that it had to end. I wanted to keep reading about the family.I definitely recommend this book and can't wait to read more from the author.Thanks to NetGalley, Lake Union Publishing and the author, Olivia Hawker, for a free electronic ARC of this novel.
Another WWII story, yet different than the others. More intimate, more humanity. If you enjoyed All the Light We Cannot See, then you should read or listen to this (the audio is excellent). What astonished me at the end of the book was learning that it's a true story, real events, real people.