The Vienna Writers Circle
A Historical Fiction Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A gripping and powerful tale of resilience and courage set in Vienna on the brink of WWII, as two members of Freud’s Circle try to keep themselves and their loved ones safe as the SS closes in.
Spring, 1938: Café Mozart in the heart of Vienna is beloved by its clientele, including cousins Mathias Kraemer and Johannes Namal. The two writers are as close as brothers. They are also members of Freud’s Circle—a unique group of the famed psychiatrist’s friends and acquaintances who once gathered regularly at the bright and airy café to talk about books and ideas over coffee and pastries. But dark days are looming.
With Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Nazi edicts governing daily life become stricter and more punitive. Now Hitler has demanded that the “hidden Jews” of Vienna be tracked down, and Freud’s Circle has been targeted. The SS aims to use old group photos to identify Jewish intellectuals and subversives. With the vise tightening around them, Mathias and Johannes’s only option appears to be hiding in plain sight, using assumed names and identities to evade detection, aware that discovery would mean consignment to a camp or execution.
Faced with stark and desperate choices, Mathias, Johannes, their families and friends all find their loyalties and courage tested in unimaginable ways. But despite betrayal, heartache and imprisonment, hope remains, and with it, the determination to keep those they love alive, and Mathias and Johannes at the same time discovering that what originally condemned them—their writing—might also be their salvation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maetis (Murder in Manhattan, as John Matthews) draws on the milieu of Sigmund Freud for a well-crafted Holocaust story. In the late 1920s, Freud forms a group of psychiatrists, writers, and other intellectuals to share ideas. But in 1938, after the Anschluss, membership in "Freud's Circle" proves risky, as Nazi officials seeking to identify Jews for deportation use old photos of the Circle to do so. Jewish cousins Mathias Kraemer and Johannes Namal, crime novelists and Circle members, are alarmed when SS officer Heinrich Schnabel enters the Cafe Mozart where they're seated and demands that the Jews present make themselves known to him. Turns out the net is tightening around the cousins. (A prologue, set in 1942, previews doom for at least one of the protagonists with a view of a railway car filled with the dead, the dying, and the sick.) With solid prose and thoughtful characterizations, Maetis ratchets up the suspense as Schabel searches for Jews and the cousins' efforts to avoid capture gets an assist from a secret ring that provides those in danger with new identities. Historical fiction fans will be pleased.
