The Weimar Triangle

Photos from the launch of The Weimar Triangle on December 4, 2010

Eric Koch has been called “a Canadian master of historical fiction” and The Globe and Mail has said,
“Eric Koch has been explaining German culture to North America for years.”

Eric Koch’s works have also been translated and published in Italy, Germany and China. His memoir, published in Canada by Mosaic Press entitled I Remember the Location Exactly, was published in 2009 in Germany by Weidle Verlag. Among his many notable achievements, Eric Koch was awarded the Yad Vashem Prize for Holocaust Writing.

The Weimar Triangle: Frankfurt 1927 is the third historical novel in Eric Koch’s trilogy exploring the making of modern Germany during the first part of the twentieth century. The other two historical novels are The Man Who Knew Charlie Chaplin (2000) and Premonitions (2008, 2009).

Weimar Germany in 1927 and 1928 almost made it!  Had it not been for the economic collapse of 1929, the fate of Weimar Germany and all of Europe, and, perhaps, the history of the 20th century, could have been different. The Weimar Triangle is set against the background of an invigorated, relatively confident  but  severely divided Germany.

To celebrate the centenary of Beethoven’s death,  the International Music Exhibition – and The Summer of Music – took place in Frankfurt in 1927. These events, now almost forgotten, marked the first occasion since the end of World War I that Germany was able to play a major role in Europe’s cultural life and provided hope that the Weimar Republic would survive and thrive.

In The Weimar Triangle, Eric Koch uses a multi-format narrative technique so highly praised in the German reviews of Die Braut im Zwielicht: Erinnerungen/I Remember the Location Exactly (Weidle Verlag, 2009), including excerpts from imagined diaries, letters and even a never-produced operetta about the failed Hitler putsch of 1923.

The “triangle” involves three main characters: Hanni Geisel, amateur musician and hostess, Erwin Herzberg, journlaist and film historian,  and Hanni’s husband, Hermann, a pacifist lawyer, who, in his spare time, gathered data on the miscarriages of justice committed by right-wing  judges. The nature of the Weimar “triangle” – Hanni, Erwin and Hermann – is revealed by a young Canadian banker who happens upon some diaries and other documents eighty years later while on a business trip to Frankfurt.