Recommended Reading
Books have always been a part of my life. Years and years ago I came across a quote by the historian Edward Gibbon and it has always stuck with me: “Books have been the glory of my life, I would not trade them for the riches of the Indies.” I feel the same way although he says it a lot better.
I have always loved historical fiction. The books of that genre which affected me the most as a writer are the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forrester. All of the novels are set during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 18th Century. Every character is finely drawn and the small details brushed into the narratives make you feel like you were there. I first read them when twelve and I have read them all at least twenty times.
A novel which had a big affect on me as a writer and is my absolute favorite is The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat. Without question, this is the finest sea novel to come out of the Second World War. Not only is the writing absolutely brilliant but the novel itself is partly autobiographical which gives it a tremendous sense of immediacy. The novel was published in 1955 and has never been out of print. It’s a classic for good reasons.
I wrote the first drafts of An Honorable German between 1980 and 1982 with subsequent revisions occuring over the years. A novel which had a big impact on me when on how I thought about my own work was Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. This book was published in 1981. The Cold War was going strong and this novel, told from the point of view of a Russian detective, gave a glimpse of life in the Soviet Union, the most ominous and unknown society of the time. Those kinds of details fascinated me and one of things I most wanted to do in my own novel was brush in those kinds of details about the Third Reich to give that sense of being there.
I read hundreds and hundreds of books while researching An Honorable German. Many were on specialized topics like the German national railway. Outside of these specialized books, I recommend the following: The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. There is no doubt that is the great memoir to be written by any soldier on any side of World War Two. This account of his years fighting on the Russian front is so shocking that you will never forget reading it.
The most interesting book on the Graf Spee was written by Captain Patrick Dove, one of the British merchant captains taken prisoner. His book, I Was Graf Spee’s Prisoner, contains many of the details used in the narrative along with his keen observation of Captain Langsdorff with whom he became friends of a sort.
If you are interested in the U-Boats, I recommend, Iron Coffins the memoirs of Herbert Werner. This was the first memoir published in English by a veteran of the U-Boatwaffe and remains the best. As he himself says in the book, his survival was simply a matter of luck. After the war he immigrated to the U.S. and became an American citizen. As of 2008 he was still alive.
A close second is The Odyssey of A U-Boat Commander by Erich Topp. Topp was a very successful U-Boat commander and later an admiral in the Bundesmarine, where he served for a time as the German Naval Attaché in Washington. Topp was a cultured and refined man, familiar with art and philosophy of all types. His memoirs are more of an intellectual reflection of how he and others were seduced by Hitler and the Nazi Party. It is brutally honest and deeply affecting.
Jak P. Mallman-Showell is the number one authority on U-Boats in the world. He has written a dozen books, all of them good. I particularly recommend: U-Boats Under the Swastika and U-Boat Commanders and Crews.
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Two books I especially recommend were written by women who lived in Germany during the Second World War. In my years of reading about World War Two, one of the few constant themes that run through the history of the war is the incredible strength of women on every side during the conflict. If you don’t believe women can fight in a war, then you haven’t read your history.
Berlin Diaries: 1940-1945 by Marie Vassiltchikov. This is one of the few contemporaneous accounts of life in Berlin under the severe Allied bombing. Marie, or Missie, was a royal (she reminds us several times) white Russian princess, who lived through this terrible period of time with the greatest of aplomb. She was young and beautiful and related to the all the royalty of Europe. Her diary is funny, sad, incredibly descriptive and fascinating to read.
When I Was A German 1934-1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany by Christabel Bielenberg. This is one of the more haunting memoirs to come out of the war. The author married a young German attorney and lived in Germany throughout the war. Her husband was involved in several plots to kill Hitler and was arrested by the Gestapo and put into a concentration camp. He barely escaped execution. Her viewpoint is completely different and makes a fascinating difference in how she experienced World War Two.
Books by journalists also provide excellent feel of daily life since they are professional observers and report on subjects such as how the rationing system worked, what color were the rationing cards, how much things cost, how one made a telephone call, what people looked like, their mood, what they wore. If you are interested in those types of details, I recommend: Into the Darkness by Lothrop Stoddard and Assignment to Berlin by Harry W. Flannery, a CBS Radio News Correspondent.
I don’t use websites for in depth research. I mainly use them to check a specific technical fact. Very few websites footnote their sources so you don’t know where their information comes from or who wrote it. When researching, I approach the web with caution. It can be a useful tool but is in no way a substitute for books by scholars.