Berlin is a city Catherine Hokin knows well. It’s the setting for many of her novels. But it’s a city that’s always changing, even though it’s soaked through with history, and there have been many Berlins, some only imagined. Here, Catherine goes in search of the lost cities of Berlin. When I first developed the […]
The Secret Hotel in Berlin by Catherine Hokin
In Berlin in 1944, Lili Rodenberg and her husband Marius run the Edel, Berlin’s most glamorous hotel. For its wealthy guests, it is an escape from the destruction outside, with its elegant piano bar and fine amber brandy. But Lili is Jewish, a secret she is terrified will end in tragedy for her and their […]
The German Child by Catherine Hokin
Berlin, 1944. ‘No! Not my child!’ Annaliese screams, her voice breaking as she pounds the window uselessly. But no-one looks up as the man in the SS uniform cradles her precious baby and strides away… She lies unmoving on the threadbare cot, her throat hoarse from long hours of screaming but her tears keep falling. […]
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme
Catherine Hokin writes about the Nazi Lebensborn programme, the background to her latest novel. What did it involve? And how did the Third Reich plan to make room for the ‘master race’ babies they envisaged being born? “The living space of the Nazis has become the dying space of Europe.” When Karl Frank – an […]
Her Last Promise by Catherine Hokin
Berlin, 1938.When Hanni’s beloved sister suddenly vanishes in the middle of the night, Hanni knows her high-ranking Nazi father, Reiner, is not telling her the whole truth and may hold the key to her disappearance. Years later, after finally learning how to live with her troubled past, Hanni dedicates herself to raising her teenage son, […]
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine
Catherine Hokin examines how the Nazi propaganda machine twisted language to hide mass murder, including their Aktion T4 euthanasia programme. Language and how it is used is particularly important to a writer. That might sound very obvious but it is a truism I have come back to again and again while writing fiction based around […]
The Girl in the Photo by Catherine Hokin
Czechoslovakia, Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, 1944. ‘I have to go away, my darling. Please, be brave, stay alive, for me.’ Her mother’s voice breaks. The little girl tries to stop the forbidden tears from falling, as the train takes her mother, and she is left alone. Berlin, six years later. Hanni Winter shows her new husband […]
The legacy of the village of Lidice
When the Nazi occupiers of the former Czech province of Bohemia, in an act of revenge, obliterated the village of Lidice and killed or transported its inhabitants, they did so intending that its very name should be erased from history. Yet Lidice soon became a symbol of the horrors of fascism and its name was […]