A Berlin Love Song Synopsis
‘Max Hartmann. Just a Berlin boy of seventeen who loved me in that long autumn of 1942, when war raged all over Europe. And I loved him back desperately, since our love was forbidden. For he was the son of a rich professor of medicine. And I was Zigeunergeschmeiss. Gypsy scum.’
Max is 17, a German schoolboy, when he meets Lili, a trapeze artist from a travelling circus that performs every year in Berlin. Lili is from a Romani gypsy tribe and her life and customs are very different from those of Max and his family. Their friendship turns into love – but love between a member of the Hitler youth and a gypsy is forbidden – as events tear them apart, can their love survive?
Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, A Berlin Love Song is a love story of passion, unexpected friendship, despair, loss and hope.
The Inspiration for A Berlin Love Song from Sarah Matthias : When I was a child growing up in Yorkshire our next-door neighbours, the Adlers, were German Jewish refugees who had fled to England during the war. Mr Adler had been imprisoned for a while in a concentration camp. He was a dentist – a proud, kindly, professional man with his own business.
He didn’t talk about his wartime experiences very much, but when he did, he used to shake and cry. This had a profound effect on me as a child; seeing an adult who I respected reduced to tears by memories of his past.
In 2011, on one of my many visits to Berlin, I happened upon an exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum entitled Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime. It was a courageous exhibition – the first time since the war that a major museum had explored the relationship between Hitler and the German Nation, addressing the question of how Hitler had managed so successfully to seduce an entire country.
It was fascinating. I was astonished by the boxes of Christmas baubles depicting Hitler’s face, the jewelled swastika for the top of the Christmas tree, the beer mats and the playing cards, all decorated with Nazi symbols. Nearby there were the striped uniforms worn by prisoners in the concentration camps and street signs bearing the words Juden verboten.
In one small corner I found a few showcases dedicated to the wartime persecution of the Romani people. I discovered that in addition to six million Jews, up to half a million Romanies from Europe had been exterminated by the Nazis and I wondered why relatively little had been written about this. On my return to London I went to the permanent Holocaust exhibition in the Imperial War Museum.
There I found another a small corner dedicated to the Romani story, but again, not very much. I set about discovering all I could about the persecution of the Roma. It was not long afterwards, in October 2012, that I read about the long-awaited memorial to the Roma and Sinti that had just been opened by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, in the Tiergarten park in Berlin, and her moving tribute to the victims.
‘Every single fate in this genocide,’ she said, ‘fills me with sorrow and shame.’ I felt I had to visit the memorial. Situated in the shadow of the Reichstag, it consists of a circular pool of water, at the centre of which there is a triangular stone, a reference to the badges that were worn by concentration camp prisoners.
In bronze letters around the edge is the poem ‘Auschwitz’ by the Romani poet Santino Spinelli that appears at the front of this book. As I stood reading these poignant words, I finally resolved to write a story about the Romani Holocaust. This novel is a work of fiction, but many of the characters in it are inspired by real people I have known or read about in diaries and first-hand accounts during my research.
Max’s father for example, the anti-Nazi paediatrician Julius Hartmann, is based on a German pastor who was a close friend of my father; the Jewish painter of portraits in Auschwitz was inspired by Dina Gottliebova, a Czech artist who really was forced to work for Dr Mengele, painting portraits in the Gypsy Family Camp.
So although my novel is a product of my imagination, I believe everything I have written could have happened. If you would like to read more about the persecution of the Roma and my inspiration for this book, please visit my website sarahmatthias.co.uk.
