Göttingen Schützenfest

Here is the loaf- where are the fishes?

The Best of the Wurst

1962 Schützenfest in Göttingen

Göttingen, Germany is  wonderful small city, a university town with brio, culture, and bustle.  I found these old photos taken out of the 3rd floor window of the Commerzbank back in 1962 on the occasion of the Schützenfest parade down Prinzenstrasse.  My in-laws lived in Göttingen since after World War II, and it was always such fun to visit.  In fact, we  visited so often that when I was writing The Shadow Warriors and needed a university for Professor Mittelstadt,  Göttingen's came to mind immediately.   I felt relieved that there was no "Institute for Advanced Computing," and I could make it up.  I made up a lot, but most of it was based on fact, including the "Stern Marsch"  and  the resulting riot.  A visit to the library's michrofiche department provided photos of police, helmets down, dogs straining at the leash.  
An  author always looks for the most dramatic setting possible, and naturally  a university always has the town/gown controversies and professors, their wives, grad students, all the things I put into The Shadow Warriors.  One day, knowing I needed certain characters for my novel, I sat in the Marktplatz and jotted down descriptions of interesting people who walked by.  I found Jakob, Marlies, Claudia, Marcus and others.  Petra was a long time coming, and I finally saw her at Roche Brothers supermarket in Wellesley, MA, but her scuffed velvet jacket came from a relative.  

Did you know the Brothers Grimm were professors at the University and were even protesters way back when?    Another interesting fact that went into The Shadow Warriors.  My nephew took me bar-hopping one night, and  again, the pubs went right into the book, but under different names.  One of them is picturered in this blog in an earlier post.  Another sidewalk cafe became Cafe Amalfi of Boston fame, now defunct.  It's a cool name, don't you think?  

If any of this sounds interesting, and you are a German who reads English, you might like The Shadow Warriors.  Other scenes are set in Berlin, Frankfurt, Baden-Baden and Singapore.  Also Hong Kong and Cambridge MA where I worked at the time.  "Warriors" is available on the German Kindle and also as a trade paperback.  Of course the Kindle version is 'way cheaper. 

Schuss!                              

Poster Art In Göttingen

Poster Art in Göttingen

Something not seen in the U.S. are kiosks full of colorful posters advertising concerts, theater events, etc.  That is one of the things we always photograph in Europe.  Here is a sample.

Another lovely feature of European cities are the flower vendors and the custom of bringing flowers for one's hostess.  I hope this custom is still alive and well.  Here is a flower vendor.   Emma, the protagonist of The Shadow Warriors, always had a vase of flowers in her room.  She missed her garden. 

The Marktplatz and the Gänseliesl

The Goose Girl before the Rathaus in the town square

A produce vendor and her wares

Flowers in the Markt

 Emma is intrigued by the bustle of the University town of Göttingen.   When I was looking for characters for The Shadow Warriors, I  sat in the Marktplazt for an hour and watched the people walking by.  Three characters showed up.  How about them apples? Göttingen  was just a great setting for a book.  I stole great hunks of landscape and sometimes I even made up stuff, but most of the scenes were created from real places. 

Here is a glimpse of the street fair and some unpleasantness from The Shadow Warriors.

The square was jammed with students, professors, couples pushing baby carriages, old age pensioners, farmers with round peasant faces, and the Turks and Greeks who had come years ago as “guest workers” and stayed on to open restaurants and small businesses.

            We milled around, picking up the carnival mood. Wayne and Christof circled the sausage stands, while Christof earnestly tried to explain the difference between bratwurst and currywurst. Marcus and I followed a tempting odor to a booth where cauliflower and mushrooms were batter-dipped and deep-fried. A vendor wearing a leather apron over his red tabard handed us paper plates heaped with the crisp goodies in exchange for a few marks. Marlies, Petra and Gaby ordered the famed white asparagus.  Crowded together on a bench, we ate pommes frites , to cushion the alcohol to come, and drank Göttinger Pilsen, which I hoped might flush our arteries in a kind of yin-yang Germanic balancing effect. The familiar American smells of pretzels and popcorn mingled with the exotic aroma of shashlik turning on a spit.

Punk rockers, hair moussed into a rainbow of spikes, arrived, and festooned themselves on the base of the Goose Girl fountain. A guitarist with a melancholy American voice sang Where Have All the Flowers Gone? A few beggars sat stoically on the pavement, holding up hand-printed placards telling their individual tragedies.

            We passed a booth selling shots of vodka, each with a fig immersed in it. Wayne pantomimed gagging gestures, but I counted out four marks in change. As I handed the money to the vendor, I caught a glimpse of a face with dark eyes, eyes that were staring at me, but the man with the eyes slipped away into the crowd. It couldn't be. There was no way that the man from the Singapore bus and the Hong Kong Market could be at the Göttingen street fair. I downed the vodka in one hasty gulp, but the alcohol couldn’t burn away that face and those eyes.

The University town of Göttingen and The Shadow Warriors

Frau Eisenach, a character in The Shadow Warriors, lives on Geiststrasse, or Ghost Street. She is an old lady in a house dress who wears carpet slippers because of a painful bunion, but she is good to my main character who stops by to visit (and to eat) every now and then. Frau Eisenach cooks up a skillet of "hoppel-poppel", bacon, egg, onion,  boiled potatoes and tomatoes fried together.  An easy, delicious supper, by the way.  The University town of Goettingen is the setting for most of the scenes of The Shadow Warriors.  I made up the "Institute for Advanced Computing," but it was based on a real building.  Over the years, what is real and what I made up have sort of merged together.   Totally weird.



My inlaws lived in the town for years and I visited often, until it was easy to write about.  When I wrote the protest march scene and others I went to the library and found the microfilm of some of the events.  My nephew took me pub-hopping and several scenes resulted from that evening.   It was really fun to put my characters into the scenes and see what they would do. 


In the next post, I'll confess how I found many of my local characters.  

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Here is where the good Frau Eisenach lived. 

The Shadow Warriors: Sentosa Beach, Singapore

Sentosa Beach in Singapore- not a body to be found when we visited.

In the "story within the story," the action in the Shadow Warriors gets going when a body washes ashore on Sentosa Beach.   Emma, the narrator, has gone to the beach with bad boy Peter Weber.  Does he recognize whose body it is?  Why is he so paranoid? 

"If you ever change your mind...the world is full of lovely resorts."  He smiled at me, and the invitation was still on the table. 

            "Peter, I'll bet you've been to Phuket under different names and invariably with a new woman on your arm."

            He glanced up at the sky again, and laughed.  I looked toward the water. That’s when I knew something was wrong.  I saw a swimmer, but not swimming, moving, yet motionless.

Grabbing his arm, I gasped, “Jesus, Peter, there’s something--it looks like a body out there.  In the surf.  Look!”

            “Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, the lady sees bodies wherever she goes.  It’s a porpoise or a log from Indonesia.”

He didn’t even bother to glance in the direction I was pointing.

            I saw a white leg, then a round torso turning over slowly, rolling in the gentle waves.  At last Peter stared at the water. 

unconscious?  Come on.  I'm a decent swimmer."

            I took Peter's hand and tried to plunge into the surf, but he didn’t budge.  While I stood and tugged on his arm, he continued to stare into the water. Finally he said,

              "The body out there is quite dead.  Take my word; you don't want to see it up close and personal. Corpses in tropical waters get ugly almost immediately.  Now, let's go for a walk instead of raiding the snack bar."

"We have to report this. What if some little kid found it?  At least let's tell the lifeguard." 

            Peter looked out beyond the placid waves again.  The body rolled drunkenly, unobserved by the little groups of sunbathers scattered along the long strand. 

"Red tape in this country tends to be very sticky.  Let's just be somewhere else," 

The Shadow Warriors is now on Kindle

Too late for Christmas, but in plenty of time for the long New England winter, my novel The Shadow Warriors is now available from Amazon on the Kindle.  The Shadow Warriors began life way back in 2001 as an e-book.  How is that possible?  I found a small e-book publisher and latched onto the technology before most readers had heard of it and long before the Kindle.  The publisher went belly up, and I got back my rights and published with Booksurge, now Createspace.

This fall I decided it was time to get the novel of technology on the latest technology.  Voila!

This blog will be devoted to all things Shadow Warriors:  the genesis of the book, photos of where scenes are set, some discussions of information warfare and other novels of technology.  We will talk about the element of fiction and also technology and some very scary stuff.  Come back often.