A Novel by Nikolai Nawri

December 1940 – The Second World War has been raging across Europe for over a year. Britain stands alone as German submarines patrol the North Atlantic in an attempt to cut the island off from vital supplies, and German bombers conduct nightly air raids on British cities. There are fears of an invasion, and the fighting is about to escalate. Then, a German submarine and its crew vanish under mysterious circumstances.

Fifty years later, the conflict finally seems over, as the Cold War comes to an end. Walls are being broken down. People who were separated for decades are brought back together. And things that have lain hidden surface again.

For Siobhán Dannreuther, her grandparents past is distant history when a research project on Antarctica provides her with a welcome opportunity to escape the dreary winter of the British Isles and the aftermath of a brutal murder. It promises to be a perfectly normal adventure.

Soon, however, she gets drawn into an increasingly confusing and unsettling world of disappearances, rumours, and myths. Reality seems to be slipping away from her. And as she begins searching for the answers to her current questions, she is confronted by the ghosts of a forgotten past.

The starting point for the writing process was reading a biography of Sophie Scholl (see the References section), the youngest and only female member of the non-violent German resistance group Die Weiße Rose (The White Rose), who operated against the Nazi regime until their capture and execution in 1943.  

If not in its actual storyline, thematically, the novel refers heavily to this real-life story. An important theme that is being addressed is the connection between ideas, ideals, and ideologies; specifically, how ideas develop into ideologies, and what happens when ideals are destroyed by an ideology. 

The original context for this basic theme was the formation of Nazism from a number of pre-existing myths, legends, and ethnic prejudices, and the subsequent elimination of humanist principles by Nazism. In the novel, the scope of this theme is limited, with an emphasis on personal rather than global conflicts, which play out in the context of the end of the Cold War.

Even so, explicit references to the Second World War are being made through the backstory of the novel, in which one of the key inciting events is a direct reference to the execution of the White Rose members, and which, after a fifty-year gap, gives rise to a series of violent crimes. The novel, therefore, is centrally concerned with the passing of unresolved conflicts from one generation to the next. Connected to this issue are "mirrored" (either parallel or inverted) storylines, which play a recurring role throughout.

Another important aspect is the contrast between the objective reality of the physical world, and subjective realities that are filtered through an individual’s understanding of the world, including their biases and prejudices, which links back to the topic of ideologies. This also involves fundamental concepts of semiotics – or the study of signs – and addresses the contrast between moral absolutism and moral ambiguity, as well as the potential impact of false narratives.

Nikolai Nawri was born on 18 November 1972 in Radolfzell, which is situated at Lake Constance in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg, only a few kilometres north of the Swiss border. However, for the first ten years of his life, he lived in the nearby town of Überlingen, before moving northeast to Heidenheim an der Brenz, within the same state. In 1992, he left secondary school with an Abitur (German A-levels). Over the following year, he completed his civilian service (offered as an alternative to, at the time, compulsory military service) in a nursery school for mentally and physically challenged children. For the next four years, he then studied Physics at the University of Bremen. During that time, he worked as a research assistant at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven. He then transferred to the University of Maryland in College Park, USA, where he studied Meteorology and received an M.Sc. degree in 2000, and a Ph.D. degree in 2003. Until 2008, he then carried out postdoctoral research on high-latitude extreme weather at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Between 2008 and 2018, he was a research scientist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office in Reykjavik, working on a range of subjects, including various climatologies for Iceland and the northern North Atlantic region, weather conditions associated with major avalanche cycles, and wind power assessments. In 2018, he left Iceland to study at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, obtaining an MSc in Marine Ecology the following year. Currently, he is employed by the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) in Lowestoft, England, working on a number of topics related to the status of bivalve molluscs and crustaceans in UK waters.

With younger family members in mind, I wrote one children's story within about a month of finishing each of the three individual parts of TSOAM. The stories are written from the point-of-view of two non-specific fantasy creatures, named Squiggledy and Wriggledy, as we follow them on a series of adventures that mirror a certain aspect of the corresponding part of TSOAM. A free PDF copy of the trilogy can be downloaded here (160 KB). s