Our most liberating destination: beyond expectations

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Our most liberating destination: beyond expectations

My thanks to blogger Rachel Poli, who is sharing a Guest Post of mine at her book-review site:

A year ago this week, I was in Germany when my novel, The Munich Girl, published last November.

In the eight years I’d spent following this story’s trail, I never once imagined that life would bring me back there for such a personally significant landmark.

This book’s pathway has been filled with things I’d never have expected.

When I was a military brat in Europe in the 1960s, my first friends were German families. After I married another brat who’d also spent part of his childhood in Germany, we began returning there as often as we could. I realized that if I wanted to understand this culture I love so much, I needed to understand more about Germany’s experience during the war.

Never could I have imagined how quickly that intention would take me straight to Hitler’s living room. Within days, I received a copy of British writer Angela Lambert’s biography of Eva Braun.

Then a combination of entirely unexpected circumstances led to my finding the portrait of Braun that began unwinding the sequence of events in The Munich Girl.

A major turning point in the story’s development occurred when I discovered, while researching the war crimes Trials at Nuremberg, that an action of Eva Braun’s in the last week of her life saved the lives of about 35,000 Allied prisoners of war.

Two members of my mother’s family were among them.

Link to the post at Rachel’s blog here:

https://rachelpoli.com/2016/11/15/creative-process-invites-us-beyond-our-expectations/