An
Olympic athlete has been enlisted to expose Hitler and his war aims.
This
is during the 1936 Berlin Games, the notorious summer festival designed to
persuade the free world that the leader of Nazi Germany is a man of peace.
Werner Seelenbinder’s mission is an unknown story; the defiance and courage of
the only Olympian in the resistance, subsequently concealed by the Americans in
the Cold War and blotted out in modern postwar Germany.
All
the characters in Seelenbinder are real; all the main events described
did happen. But amid the preparations for the coup and its nightmarish end,
there unfolds a riddle of fact versus fiction: when you are a novelist telling
a story of mythical dimension, where do you draw the line?
“Seelenbinder
is a triumph: scintillating, suspenseful and revelatory in its disclosure of
the malign mix between politics and sport which marked the ’36 Olympics. It is
also a superb, indeed seamless, merging of the fictional and non-fictional, in
such a way as to make that distinction redundant. We are at one with the author
as he attempts to solve an 80-year-old mystery. McNeish is a consummate
story-teller and Seelenbinder is a minor masterpiece.” — Martin Edmond
Steele Roberts - $34.95
978 0 947493 01 1
James McNeish with Paul Morris of the Goethe Institute.
James McNeish chatting to the German ambassador, Dr Anne-Marie Schleich.
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