L-aħħar sajf ta’ Berlin

Berlin, Summer, 1936.

The Olympics are days away and everything is ready for the world to be amazed at the supremacy of the Reich.

At the top of the complex and ambitious Olympics organisation, there’s a man – a soldier: Wolfgang Fürstner. Weeks before the opening ceremony, he is outed by a newspaper leak as having Jewish heritage. Hitler removes him from his post and from being the deus ex machina of the Olympics. Fürstner finds himself demoted and made answerable to one of his former assistants. Although he is still highly respected by the veterans of the First World War, he now faces the humiliation of the young generation of Nazi soldiers. It is only thanks to the intervention of a colleague, and especially because no one else has the know-how and competence to run the Games, that he is left to oversee the Olympic Village in a secondary role.

Meanwhile, Berlin is filling up with journalists from all over the world and as Hilter and Leni Riefenstahl demanded, cameras are all set to broadcast the Olympics for the first time in history. While Jesse Owensmakes history by winning four gold medals, the Korean marathon runner Son Kitei is forced to compete and win for Japan, and Austria-Peru becomes one of the most controversial football matches ever played, Fürstner wanders like a ghost around his city, which is adorned for this big feast. He does not recognise his own country, the one he loved so much, nor does he know his wife anymore, and perhaps not even himself.

This episode, so spiteful and yet so familiar, is unfortunately a true story. It is the result of a mix of elements that are still too common nowadays: malice that destroys a man’s reputation, leaks in the media and the absolute hatred that is at the core of racist politics. The bitter irony here is the racist regime turns on itself and stabs the man who, just one day earlier, was at the top of its hierarchy.

This is the heart of the novel Laħħar sajf ta’ Berlin, written by the well-known journalist Federico Buffa together with author Paolo Frusca, and published originally by Rizzoli in Italian. The novel recounts this incredible historical episode that brings together sports, passion and the ultimate brutality of the Reich. All this, with the Berlin Olympics of 1936 in the background.

The novel L-aħħar sajf ta’ Berlin has now been translated into Maltese by Mark Vella and published by Merlin Publishers.

Intertwined with the vicissitudes of Fürstner, the novel also recounts the fictional story of an American journalist, Dale Warren, who arrives in Berlin to report on the Olympics. In the novel, Warren’s destiny and that of Fürstner move in parallel, and meet to tell this emotional story that transports the readers to a surreal Berlin of 1936, a city adorned for celebrations, days before the Nuremberg Laws that led inevitably to the Second World War, came into force. ‘L-aħħar sajf ta’ Berlin’ is available from all bookshops and online directly from merlinpublishers.com