This book features first-person narratives of more than 85 participants and dozens of rare photographs. They offer snapshots of the Somme-fighter's reality, collectively illustrating what it was like for the German soldier at the apex of combat on the Western Front.

A reader on popular culture

I like to joke how this is sort of two novels which kinda got merged. This occurred whenever inflicted with “burn out” during those heavy days I pounded on the computer keyboard writing, Three Cheers for Father Donovan. For anyone who’s never done it, let me attest as to how the necessary research and the required language translations extract a costly toll. {Latin is the official language of the Holy See. Yes, some Vatican documents are translated into English, but many are not.} Thus, it is agony to enjoy the ecstasy for me to say, “J.D., you did good job.” And it happens only when it’s over... It never fails. I always embark on writing one of these grandiose, epic historical novels completely cognizant of the scope, but utterly ignorant of the scale. Such was the case writing The Bolsheviks...Three Cheers for Father Donovan...The Black Madonna to some degree. It is a one to four year odyssey in which I will ask myself many times, “J.D., is this really worth it?” It must be. I always persevere until completion. However, in search of a diversion, I would—from time to time—seek escape by prattling about the exploits of the Rearchek, Langer, Machado, and Benelli families. Nothing much. Twenty pages here. Thirty pages there. In the end, I found myself with a lore of exactly two hundred pages when it came time to submit my manuscript, Three Cheers for Father Donovan, to the publisher. Then came, The Pontchartrain Connection. I never experience a need for any “down time” when I wrote that novel. For some reason, with that novel, I was in a state of perpetual “writer’s groove” from start to finish. {Writer’s groove is what I call that weird clarity of knowing full well beforehand as to where this is all going and how my characters will get there.} Once again, after handing my publisher the manuscript for, The Pontchartrain Connection, I did find myself examining those two hundred pages and saying, “J.D., let’s finish it.” So I did. Hence, everything from the point when Sherrie and Sheba fall in love onward constitutes the new novel. Everything prior to that is the old. As my copy-editor, Mandy, told me after a review of my old script, “Gee, J.D., why all the sex?” Answer: “I was toying around when I wrote it.” So, why in the hell am I boring my readers to death with this whining confession as to why I wrote what amounts to a trashy potboiler? Well folks, the answer to that is two-fold: One, it makes for a fun read. Two, another epic is in the works. Yes, it’s about to happen all over again. I am now toiling with my attempt to mate Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein, with Dale Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. The outcome will be something I call, The Maltese Messiah. Now, there is some good news: I have in the works not one, but two novels to fall back on should I need a break...The sequel to this novel, The Unholy Family, and the follow-on novel, The Run for the Roses... May the God of Our Fathers be with me!

In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp’s three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell’s Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, ten members of Ripp’s family on his father’s side died in the Holocaust. His mother’s side of the family, numbering thirty people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Without exception they escaped the Final Solution. Hell’s Traces tells the story of the two families’ divergent paths. To spark the past to life, he embarks on a journey to visit Holocaust memorials throughout Europe. “Could a stone pillar or a bronze plaque or whatever else constitutes a memorial,” he asks, “cause events that took place more than seven decades ago to appear vivid?” A memorial in Warsaw that includes a boxcar like the ones that carried Jews to Auschwitz compels Ripp to contemplate the horror of Alexandre’s transport to his death. One in Berlin that invokes the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s allows him to better understand how his mother’s family escaped the Nazis. In Paris he stumbles across a playground dedicated to the memory of the French children who were deported, Alexandre among them. Ultimately, Ripp sees thirty-five memorials in six countries. He encounters the artists who designed the memorials, historians who recall the events that are memorialized, and survivors with their own stories to tell. Resolutely unsentimental, Hell’s Traces is structured like a travelogue in which each destination enables a reckoning with the past.

The world of literature responds to the "spirit of carnival" in ways that are both social and cultural, mythological and archetypal. Literature provides a mirror in which carnival is reflected and refracted through the multifarious perspectives of verbal art. In his original, wide-ranging book, David K. Danow catches the various reflections in that mirror, from the bright, life-affirming magical side of carnival, as revealed in the literature of Latin American writers, to its dark, grotesque, death-embracing aspect as illustrated in numerous novels depicting the dire experience of the Second World War. The remarkable meshing of these two diametrically opposed yet inextricably intertwined facets of literature (and of life) makes for an intriguing sphere of investigation, for the carnival spirit is animated by a human need to dissolve borders and eliminate boundaries—including, symbolically, those between life and death—in an ongoing effort to merge opposing forces into new configurations of truth and meaning. Expanding upon the seminal ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival, argues Danow, is designed to allow one extreme to flow into another, to provide for one polarity (official culture) to confront its opposite (unofficial culture), much as individuals engage in dialogue. In this case the result is "dialogized carnival" or "carnivalized dialogue." In their artmaking, Danow claims, human beings are animated by a periodic predisposition toward the bright side of carnival, matched by an equally strong, far darker predilection. Carnival forms of thinking are firmly embedded within the human psyche as archetypal patterns. In this engaging exploratory book, we are shown the distinctive imprint of these primordial structures within a multitude of seemingly disparate literary works.

Combines professional insights along with the author's own experience and insights to speculate on how believers can make sense of their Christian faith when confronted with tragedy and suffering.