Berlin Fractured

Chapter 6

Dear Reader,

After finishing the War Girl series that I’ve been writing for almost three years, it was strange to start a new series. The first book in a series is always the most difficult one, because I don’t know the characters yet. Therefore I managed to sneak in a familiar and beloved character, hoping you enjoyed her cameo as much as I did.

As always, I took inspiration from true events, and Werner is loosely modeled after the real-life defector Wolfgang Leonhard. Reading his autobiography, I got a thorough glimpse into the mind of a devoted communist who has to come to terms with the fact that everything he believed in has been perverted and is used to oppress people. I sincerely empathized with tortured Werner as he struggled to align his beliefs with the reality.

Both Georg and Julian are fictional characters, although inspired by the person of Georg Wrazidlo, a doctor and victim of the Nazis and Stalinism. It was he who held the inauguration speech at the Berlin University on 26th of January 1946 and was later arrested under trumped-up antifascist charges because he opposed the Sovietization of the German politics.

Both the American and the Soviet Commandant in Berlin changed several times within the timeline of the book, but I decided to keep a single character for each of them to make it easier to follow the story.

Dean Harris and General Sokolov are each a mish-mash of several real Commandants in Berlin. One of them was Frank L. Howley, whose memoir Berlin Command is an eye-opening account of Soviet antics and Western appeasement during a time when the world was sliding into the Cold War. His depictions of the irascible, confrontational and dogmatic personality of his Soviet counterpart Alexander Kotikov were my inspiration for the fictional character of General Sokolov.

Berlin CommandWhile writing From the Ashes I’ve come to love Bruni and her devil-may-care attitude so much, that I decided she’ll be the protagonist of the next book in the series, called On the Brink.

From the Ashes On the BrinkI don’t have a definite release date yet, but if you want to stay informed about upcoming books, sign up for my reader’s group here:

https://kummerow.info/subscribe

As always, I want to thank everyone who helped make this book a reality. Daniela Colleo from stunningbookcovers.com made another fantastic cover for me. My editors JJ Toner and Martin O’Hearn polished the manuscript to shine. And my wonderful advance readers pointed out a few more typos for me to fix.

Thank you for reading,

Marion Kummerow