April in Paris by Michael Wallner

Michael Wallner is a screen writer and a first time novelist from Germany. I especially enjoyed his afterword at the end of the book as he explains how he came to write this novel. While hiking along the cliffs on the Normandy coast the author comes across the remains of an old German bunker. He starts to imagine what a young German soldier would be thinking if he were a foreigner in a strange land. As I read the novel I am reminded at how infatuated this young man Roth is in everything French. He has learned to speak fluent French without a German accent and he enjoys his abilities to be taken as a Frenchman. This role that he has been assigned, the German who is hated on the streets of the one place he has always wanted to visit, joined with the temptation to disappear into the crowd and pass himself off as a native, is too much for him. Because he is young and naive he is unaware of the full danger he has exposed himself to. Because the novel takes place toward the end of the war, this is an unrealistic premise. He should have been more aware of the unrelenting brutality of the German soldiers against the traitors. Another good read about World War II.