Dear Reader,
Sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint where a story idea begins, but for this novel it began when my family visited Ellis Island. To my surprise and joy, I found a listing for my grandfather’s voyage home from Germany in 1936. I knew he had studied in Germany, but it hadn’t sunk in that he’d studied in Hitler’s Germany.
Peter is not—I repeat not—modeled after my grandfather. But many elements of his career are based on my grandfather’s. John F. Ebelke studied in the Junior Year in Munich program in 1935–36, received his PhD in German from the University of Michigan, became a professor at Wayne State University, and cowrote a textbook with Conrad P. Homberger. Their work, which included pronunciation diagrams of the mouth, lips, and tongue, was unusual for its time and helped many students over the years—including me.
During World War II, John Ebelke served with the US Army Specialized Training Program to teach American soldiers the German language and culture. After the war, he was instrumental in reinstating the Junior Year in Munich program. Sadly, he died in 1960, and I never had the chance to meet him.
You’ll see many of these elements in Peter’s story, but everything else about Peter’s story is entirely fictional, especially his ethical struggle.
However, Peter and Evelyn display the two most common reactions to prewar Nazi Germany (1933–39) seen in American and British visitors—students, tourists, businessmen, correspondents, and others. Some were impressed with the cleanliness, order, and prosperity, while the rest of the world struggled with the upheaval and economic troubles of the Great Depression. Others were horrified by the persecution of Jews, political opponents, religious leaders, and the disabled—years before the horrors of the death camps and gas chambers. Those visitors felt the oppressive atmosphere of living in a police state, where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could land you in a concentration camp.
General Gerlach is fictional, but he represents real German military officers who plotted to arrest Hitler when he gave the order to invade Czechoslovakia. We can only speculate what might have happened if Britain and France hadn’t appeased Hitler in Munich. As for Kristallnacht, ninety-one people were killed, and over two thousand of those arrested that night are estimated to have died in concentration camps. Sadly, as Peter noted in the story, the hatred was never satiated—it only grew.
The RMS Aquitania was a real ship—the ship on which my grandmother sailed home from her “grand tour” of Europe, also in 1936. The American News Service and all American newspapers in the story are fictional, as are all characters, except the historical figures—and the historical figures mentioned include pioneering female correspondents Dorothy Thompson and Sigrid Schultz. Herr Gold’s café is fictional, but his Gemütlichkeit was inspired by an innkeeper we met in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2007.
If you’re on Pinterest, please visit my board for When Twilight Breaks (www.pinterest.com/sarahsundin) to see pictures of events and places mentioned in the novel, fashions, and other inspiration for the story.