The Brass Age

In 1769, a year of hunger in Germany, the narrator's ancestor Kempf heads east with others hoping for a better life, and generations of Germans make their home in Slavonia. When Europe goes to war again, these Volksdeutsche are summoned to fight for a Reich that has become foreign to them. Georg Kempf, the narrator's father, is forced into the Waffen SS and deserts, knowing the risk; as the war ends he and Vera, a devoted partisan, become lovers, although a little earlier they would have been bound to shoot each other. Drawing on the author's own family, this fresco of two centuries follows a minority torn from its roots up to the expulsion of the Germans from Yugoslavia in 1945, a story of memory and forgetting, of private against official history, and of belonging to the wrong nation at the wrong moment.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

365 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, War, Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

Germany, Croatia, 1769–1945

First published

2015 by TIM press

Author's age

67 when first published

ISBN

9789538075117 (original)

9781914495229 (Mountain Leopard Press, United Kingdom)

9781035427307 (Mountain Leopard Press, United Kingdom)