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World War II – Spies in Wartime Berlin – Peter Mann
168 Plays1 year ago
Ep 026 – Fiction. In wartime Berlin, intelligence & spying was anything if not complicated— both morally and in practice. Peter Mann’s excellent new novel, “The Torqued Man,” explores the contorted lives of two German spies in the final years of World War II.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Novel
00:00:00
Speaker
It's about the double life of an Irish spy in wartime Berlin. And it is about that. And it essentially follows an Irish Republican, IRA fighter, radical anti-Nazi who finds himself
00:00:19
Speaker
kind of doing the bidding of the Germans through strange historical circumstances, but then actually it's really a novel about what happens when the thing that's supposed to happen doesn't happen. So in this case, it would be the planned German invasion of Britain. That was planned for 1940. That never happens. And so my anti-Nazi Irishman finds himself cooling his heels in Nazi Berlin for the duration of the war.
Meet the Author: Peter Mann
00:00:55
Speaker
Hello, everyone. This is AJ Wardhams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show Peter Mann talking about his new novel, The Torqued Man. Peter Mann is a PhD in modern European history and is a past recipient of the winning fellowship
00:01:20
Speaker
He teaches history and literature at Stanford and the University of San Francisco. He is also a graphic artist and cartoonist. And I checked out some of your cartoons, Peter, and they're really cool. And this is his debut novel. So, Peter, how are you doing today? Doing well. Doing well, Jay. How are you?
00:01:40
Speaker
I'm great. On the note of your cartoons that you've got, I went to your website and you've got a ton of stuff up there. What's your output on these cartoons? How often are you drawing these?
From Cartoonist to Novelist
00:01:56
Speaker
You know, I had a stint for about seven years from 2014 to 2021, where I did a weekly comic. I was syndicated on GoComics.com, so it made me have to produce. Every Monday morning, something had to come out of me. Nothing like deadlines. Yeah, nothing like a weekly deadline was great. And then since that expired, I do them much more leisurely. But the years and the weeks pile up. Now, did you do the cover art on your book?
00:02:26
Speaker
I did. Oh, that's really cool. I wondered. I hesitated to ask you in case the answer was no, you didn't, but that's really cool. Very nice. That's true. I didn't expect that. I just really didn't ask for it going in, but when they asked if I wanted to take a shot at it, I leaped at the opportunity. Oh, that's really cool. I interviewed a journalist, an Iraqi journalist, a few weeks ago.
00:02:52
Speaker
I went through the whole book up until our interview where he mentioned he was an architecture guy and he does a lot of doodling. And I connected the dots because in his book there were a lot of doodles around. I was like, did you draw those? He's like, yes, I did. I was like, oh, that's very cool. So cool. So you're a very talented cartoonist as well as a novelist. And we were talking before the show, your book
00:03:17
Speaker
is right up my alley. It's so unique, it's so interesting, it's packed full of history, World War II history, which is very interesting to me, so really nice job there. Maybe to get us started here in your own words, what is your novel about?
The Novel's Unique Premise
00:03:38
Speaker
Oh, the toughest question.
00:03:40
Speaker
The short answer I give people is it's about the double life of an Irish spy in wartime Berlin. And it is about that. And it essentially follows an Irish Republican, IRA fighter, radical anti-Nazi who finds himself
00:04:02
Speaker
of doing the bidding of the Germans through strange historical circumstances, but then actually it's really a novel about what happens when the thing that's supposed to happen doesn't happen. So in this case it would be the planned German invasion of Britain.
00:04:17
Speaker
That was planned for 1940. That never happens. And so my anti-Nazi Irishman finds himself cooling his heels in Nazi Berlin for the duration of the war. And
Dual Narratives: Spy Handler and Irishman
00:04:29
Speaker
so it's really about told from two perspectives, one from his German spy handler, who himself is a vexed
00:04:40
Speaker
in a vexed position, in the sense that he also glows the Nazis, but finds himself working for them, even more deeply complicit in them. And it's a count of his relationship with this charismatic Irishman, Frank Pike. And then the other narrative in the manuscripts are, is what we can maybe say is the voice of Frank Pike himself, although it's veiled in this kind of mythical, fictional third-person narrative called Finn McCool. In the bowels of Teutonia,
00:05:10
Speaker
Finn McCool in the bowels of Titania concerning his murderous exploits in Berlin. So it's this kind of larger than life Celtic mythical veneer over whatever, whatever our Irishman has actually been up to in the Reich during these years. Very cool. Well, I was going to ask this later on in the conversation, but since you brought it up, I'll ask now, why did you choose to structure this story? Just half as half of it as a journal and half as a novel manuscript.
00:05:38
Speaker
Uh, you know, I didn't set out that way. It's something about, I think it's one of those things that kind of struck me while I was working out how I was going to tell this story. I think I knew, I started with, with the journal from the spy handler, from a character, Adrian de Groot, and I had a sense of him as a character. And some of this was drawn from, from a journal. This was a really interesting journal by a guy named Friedrich Rieck, who was a,
00:06:06
Speaker
a deeply conservative but anti-Nazi who wrote this wartime journal throughout the 30s and 40s. And that put an idea in my head. And then Thomas Mann's novel, Dr. Faustus, which uses his conceit of telling the life story of a composer, but through, from the perspective of his friend. And so I thought, oh, there'd be something interesting there in terms of if my guy is telling his story, is telling the story about the Irish character, Frank Pike,
00:06:37
Speaker
right through his own journal looking back. And then the Frank Pite narrative, why it became this larger-in-life mythical thing, I think it's just part of his, I wanted to play with this idea of, we can't really know, keeping it veiled in mystery in terms of what this person's really doing. And so I think the
Historical Inspirations: Frank Pike and Frank Ryan
00:06:59
Speaker
cloak of fiction seemed right for how he would tell his story.
00:07:03
Speaker
But really this idea of the two dueling perspectives came to me when I was reading, I was reading through files in the UK National Archives. So I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here in the sense that I based this story off of a real character. So my Irishman Frank Pike is very much based off of a real man named Frank Ryan, who just like in the novel was an IRA fighter Republican who went over to Spain to fight the fascists in the Civil War.
00:07:32
Speaker
got caught, got thrown in Franco's prison, ostensibly for life, until who shows up in the summer of 1940. But the Germans, German military intelligence, and says, hey, we'll let you out of this horrible prison cell if you come to Berlin, come work for us. And of course, the plan was to send him back to Ireland and coordinate the Irish wing of this planned German invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Line. And it never happens. So anyways, I was reading files about this
00:08:02
Speaker
the interrogation actually of Frank Ryan's German spy handler. So these were interrogations done I think the fall of 1945 by British and American occupying authorities in Berlin. And so I think that's what put me on to the idea of telling the story through the spy handler who's they're basically pressing this guy for like, what was this guy Frank Ryan up to? What happened to him? What was he really doing?
00:08:29
Speaker
And, you know, he has his version of events and I thought, oh, it'd be interesting to tell the other version of events that in some sense, you know, intersects with overlaps with the official story, but also departs from it wildly at certain parts.
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah, and I felt like this was such a good story for that type of structure because there is a lot of mystery that's going on that kept my attention. It should be noted that Alan first blurbed your book. And if that were me, I would think that was like the coolest thing in the world. Yeah, that was amazing. Yeah, because I love his books and I love those types of stories. But you're right, like having fiction,
00:09:14
Speaker
These are two pieces of writing that the story is being told through. I don't know if the academic term for this is metafiction. Maybe not. I think that generally applies.
00:09:27
Speaker
Okay, yeah. Yeah, but I think that structure really added to the intrigue of the story, because I thought, you know, as you're reading a story like this, you kind of wonder, I wondered as a reader, you know, what's true? What's false? You bring up at points in the story how stories are often, you know, misleading. So that was a very cool way I thought to structure this book.
00:09:56
Speaker
Going back to some of the history, like you mentioned, your two main characters, Adrian and Pike, although they go by several names throughout the story. I'll probably just call them Adrian and Pike. Those are real people. I was actually really fortunate, before reading your book, I interviewed a writer named Tom Dunkel. He wrote a book called Black Nights in the White Orchestra.
00:10:26
Speaker
And it's all about the Abwehr. And yeah, I even, lots of characters from his, and his was a nonfiction narrative, but even Fabian von Schlabendorf makes an appearance in your book. Yeah. Talk a little bit about, so your main character, Adrian, let's start with Adrian, one of your main characters. Talk a little bit about the historical person that you based him off of, Kurt, I believe.
00:10:55
Speaker
And talk about the avare and what his job was and what the real person was doing in Berlin. Your book takes place between 1943 and 1945, mostly. Talk a little bit about the history behind the character who was Adrian.
00:11:14
Speaker
Sure.
Character Study: Adrian's Complexity
00:11:15
Speaker
So Adrian's journal starts in November of 1943, which is during some pretty severe bombing, British bombing of Berlin, lots of parts of the western part of the city were totally obliterated. And then it goes, his journal I think ends in
00:11:31
Speaker
May of 1944, but he's looking back, recounting his relationship with Pike. That starts as far back as the summer of 1940. So you're getting a good chunk of the war in Europe, summer 1940 to spring 1944.
00:11:48
Speaker
So the real person, yeah, his name was Kurt Holler. And again, I learned about this from those interrogation reports. And I think I was led to those based on reading a couple of biographies of Frank Ryan. So I knew the basic setup in terms of, you know, Frank Ryan was taken from Spain by the Abwehr, brought to Germany, made mention of this guy, and then I dug in more to him. And I don't think
00:12:14
Speaker
At least I didn't learn a great deal about Kurt Holler, but I got enough of a sense of him. He was a PhD, I think, in philology.
00:12:25
Speaker
I kind of quickly like had enough of a historical sketches character that I then like departed. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to find out more details of Kirk Holler, but instead I filled him in kind of with my own imagination and a composite of other figures. I mentioned before Thomas Mann's novel, Dr. Faustus, there is there's something about the kind of
00:12:48
Speaker
The narrator there is a zerinist zeitblom, and there's something about this kind of humanist
00:12:57
Speaker
conservative but horrified by fascism. He's living in Nazi Germany, he's a closeted gay man. He is someone who had lived in Weimar, Berlin, where sexuality could be out in the open. And now he's had to bottle that back in. So he's had to do his own kind of contortions in order to stomach being able to work for this regime. And he found himself kind of
00:13:27
Speaker
drawn in, I think he never intended to become a working for military intelligence.
00:13:35
Speaker
Under the Nazi regime so he goes to to Spain to essentially translate He himself my character got a he himself is a literary translator. He made a living Scrashed out a living in Feimar Berlin now real quick. Are you you're you talking about the historical? Well, you know my next question for you is gonna be some of the differences between the real person Kurt
00:14:02
Speaker
and your character Adrian. So maybe this is a good segue to talk about Adrian and like what he's doing and his personality too. Cause I thought he was a very well-formed character, but yeah, maybe this is a good, a good time to segue into the fictional Adrian. Yeah, I already kind of shaded in there because like I said, I am beyond the kind of situational relationship. And then like, here was this guy's spy handler who was keeping track of this Irishman in Berlin. Uh, I knew, you know, I knew the house he was living at on Nymphinburg, Estrasa.
00:14:31
Speaker
which is the same house used in the novel, right on what used to be called Hindenburg Park, which is now Wilmersdorf Folk Park. So I didn't know much beyond that, though. So then I started filling it in. So then I had no idea, for example, what Kurt Haller's sexuality was. There wasn't a sexual dimension to the relationship that I knew of that didn't come out in interrogation reports, at least. But so much doesn't come out in those. So there's a lot to be filled in.
00:14:56
Speaker
which is part of the fun, right? I think if I had like a fully fleshed historical portrait, then I'd feel like there's a little less room for me as a novelist. But whereas I think what was really enticing was that there was just enough of a kind of skeleton that I could flesh it out with fiction. And yet it was fun to plug into, you know, the elements of reality that I wanted to hew to. So yeah, so the fictional character, Adrian DeGroote,
00:15:27
Speaker
is a literary translator and finds himself in Spain in the early 30s, kind of right after the Nazis have started to assert their power. Hitler hasn't taken power yet, but they've become, after 1930, become a real political force. You couldn't ignore them as a bunch of lunatic fringe anymore. Said they were lunatic mainstream.
00:15:48
Speaker
And so he runs off to Spain, which is after 1931 until 1936, is this kind of similar to the Weimar Republic. It's the Spanish Second Republic. It's this kind of renaissance of modernization, Republican thinking, flourishing of arts and culture. And then, of course, a lot of similar to Weimar, a lot of political polarization by the, you know,
00:16:14
Speaker
1934, street violence, assassinations, the rise of fascist movement. So he gets sucked into the Spanish Civil War and finds himself doing translation work.
00:16:30
Speaker
for a, you know, semi shadowy employer. Turns out it's the Abwehr. And then by the time the war is in full effect, he's, you know, doing real spy work, forging documents, keeping tabs on enemy nationals. So that by the time 1940 rolls around, he's kind of old handed this but still, still never really thinks of himself as
00:16:55
Speaker
He never really thinks of himself as a spy and never thinks of himself as a Nazi. A lot of the people in the Abwehr, in German military intelligence, were either, you know, hostilely indifferent to the Nazis or outright opposed to them, which ends up playing a role in terms of later assassination efforts.
00:17:14
Speaker
I think William Canaris, who is in your book, he was actually like he plotted against Hitler and he led the whole up there. I might be misremembering that, but he was not a fan of Hitler. I know that. No, right. But he still spent a lot of time working on his war efforts. It was this interesting dance that he did of kind of subtle undermining while also working towards Hitler's war aims at the same time and choosing opportune moments.
00:17:44
Speaker
And so that, that sense of like complicity of kind of like telling yourself one story of like, well, I'm not really, you know, I'm not, I don't really believe in this. In fact, I hate this. I'm doing, but I'm just doing this because it's my job. And that, that really appealed to me as a,
00:17:59
Speaker
That is the sense of that's an ethically appealing way to live. It resonated with me. It is really interesting to be...
Inside the Abwehr: Loyalties and Operations
00:18:08
Speaker
I've always found the structure... I'm not a military historian. I've always found the structure of intelligence during World War II in Nazi Germany, a very fascinating topic because of what you're just talking about.
00:18:25
Speaker
They're not, like the Abwehr is not like packed full of Nazis. You know, maybe some of them have Nazi sympathies. A lot of them are kind of opposed to, to the regime. And so it does make this like weird, you know, like the, the, the, the ends, you know, the aims of these people are just doing their job, but like it is helping, helping this further this war effort that the Nazis have started. And it is like a very kind of interesting.
00:18:54
Speaker
a topic to explore when it comes to morality and why people are doing what they're doing. Yeah, there's a lot of odd bedfellas in the intelligence world. I mean, not just the Albert, but I think it makes it so fascinating, especially from a literary point of view. I think Alan first does a great job of exploring this through his fiction is how people who would otherwise, in times of war, not get intellectuals who might become
00:19:24
Speaker
professors instead find themselves sucked into espionage or maybe our professors and sucked into espionage, but you find types like doing the work of war that are people who do not resemble soldiers at all. Yeah. Well, one of the elements that you've explored in your book that I found this was like, and even in history, I find that this is such an extreme is medicine and doctors.
00:19:54
Speaker
Well,
Nazi Doctors and T4 Program
00:19:55
Speaker
talk a little bit about in your book, I know we're veering away from Adrian, but we're just going to do it for a second because I want to stay on this thread. Talk a little bit about the role that doctors play in your book and how you portray them in this story. Yeah, they don't come off in the best light in this book.
00:20:17
Speaker
Nothing against doctors, per se, but, you know, Nazi doctors are into some pretty heinous stuff. And it's interesting, I mean, like, it's not, you can think about the horrors of say, like a Joseph Mengele, right? And the experiments conducted by him at Auschwitz. But I think that the role of medicine and the medical profession is actually even more deeply enmeshed.
00:20:43
Speaker
than even just those kind of horrific cases in the sense that Nazism was this kind of biomedical ideology of cleansing the racial body of the German folk. And that wasn't just rhetoric in the sense that I think doctors as a profession had one of the highest memberships in Nazi party. Is that right? I didn't know that. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. There's a really interesting book
00:21:13
Speaker
called the Nazi doctors by Robert J. Lifton, who's a psychiatrist, but who then veered into a lot of history, studied brainwashing in Maoist China, and studied the role of the Nazi doctors. And there's been a lot of interesting work on it since. So one of the ways that doctors were so enmeshed, I think, in the
00:21:37
Speaker
the murderous policies of the Nazis leading up to the Holocaust. This is before war and the Holocaust was in this euthanasia program.
00:21:49
Speaker
It was called the T4, in hindsight called the T4 euthanasia program, operated out of Tiergartenstrasse 4, so that became the kind of codename for it. And it kind of defies belief, except you also then see what comes after it. You realize that there's this process of kind of gradual escalation up to the systematic state killing of people's deemed undesirable. And the euthanasia program
00:22:18
Speaker
was a domestic program where doctors and nurses were involved in basically putting out feelers and sterilizing, started with mass sterilization, sterilizing anyone who had hereditary illness or development, mentally handicapped, physically disabled, people with epilepsy, people with cerebral palsy,
00:22:48
Speaker
Any of those people were sterilized. And then it ratchets it up. The euthanasia program then takes it to the next level. And they actually started calling for people, you know, bringing their children to the hospital, people suffering from debilitating, let's say, cerebral palsy is the one that appears in my book.
00:23:08
Speaker
bringing sick kids to or disabled kids to the hospital for quote treatment and then a couple weeks later returning an urn to them of their ashes. It was done with some level of deception in the sense they'd say often that the cause of death was pneumonia or an infection but they were killing
00:23:31
Speaker
children. They were killing, and they were killing German children within the domestic, right? This didn't have to do necessarily, had nothing to do extensively with racism, but the same kind of logic of the phrase they used was, this was like their technical phrase, was life unworthy of life. And so all these people were purged from the racial body. And yeah, so, you know, thousands of doctors and nurses and hospitals were complicit in this.
00:23:59
Speaker
That's so crazy because you think of medicine, like the profession itself, you're supposed to help people, of course, and to hear a statistic like doctors in Nazi Germany had one of the highest membership rates in the Nazi party. That's just such an interesting
00:24:24
Speaker
I mean, one, it's very sad, but you just think about what would make somebody who has professed to be this person who will only help people, what makes them subscribe to this type of ideology?
00:24:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think part of it is like a little rhetorical sleight of hand that, you know, people thought instead of like healing the individual body that if you go, well, I'm healing the collective body. It's still and it's that racial body that is the most important one. And so it's that little switch of thinking that people still could tell themselves, I'm still doing the work of medicine. I'm still engaged in healing. Yeah. Well, both of your characters, both Adrian and Pike, neither of them like doctors.
00:25:10
Speaker
Pike,
Historical Torture and Experimentation
00:25:11
Speaker
I believe like he, he sees like doctors abusing people in a Spanish prison. And I think he actually is a victim of something that abused himself. But let's actually, let's, let's talk about Pike. Um, we talked about Adrian. So first, similarly, how is Pike different from the historical Frank Ryan? And then just talk about Pike, the character who is, is the spy in this story. Talk about the character.
00:25:38
Speaker
Well, just like falling on our last subject there just to tie it together. So you mentioned Frank Pike, the character undergoes torture, essentially the hands of doctors in his Spanish prison, which is based on, again, a real historical event that I can't recall any more whether Frank Ryan, the real historical figure himself would have been a victim of this, but people very much like him. A lot of people from the international brigades and other Irish fighters specifically, I know,
00:26:09
Speaker
were, they did systematic studies on them, the prisoners that Franco's forces captured. They studied them in order to prove this theory that was a kind of brainchild of Spanish fascist medicine with the help of Nazi medicine, which was this idea that Marxism was not just an ideology that people could believe and that, you know, become
00:26:35
Speaker
dangerous political forces as far as they were concerned but that it was actually a Disease of the mind that one could inherit and you could be like you could have like you could be a congenital Marxist So they were doing all of these, you know cranial measurement measurements mapping Batteries of tests to determine whether people were congenital Marxist this was done on international brigade prisoners. So Frank Ryan was a
00:27:04
Speaker
was, like I said, yeah, an IRA fighter, he had fallen out with the IRA itself, became kind of riven by factionalism as far back as, you know, the Irish Civil War in the early 20s, but into the 30s, they kind of split into a left-wing faction and a right-wing faction, and Frank Reinfeld himself on the left, and so found himself kind of out of the good graces there after
00:27:31
Speaker
1934, but then went off to Spain to fight real Frank Ryan led, I think it was called the Connolly Brigade, a group of Irish fighters in Spain. He found himself, I think, quickly doing more propaganda work. And then he was at the front a bit, but found himself kind of, you know, behind the lines doing a lot of the word work, the rhetorical work of the war. And
00:27:59
Speaker
and was captured in 1937 at Candesa by Italian troops and was originally sentenced to death by Franco, by Franco's tribunal. But then they commuted to sentence and he, I think they commuted to sentence too because I believe if I have this right, everything's becoming hazier now that I work on a different book project and this one recedes from memory.
00:28:24
Speaker
Edmund de Valera was the prime minister of Ireland at the time and would be for a long time, but I believe he recognized Franco's government at some point toward the end of the war. And so that got Frank Ryan switched from death sentence to just life in prison. And he became Frank, Franco is one of his most kind of valued famous prisoners. He was something of a personage. And then so as far as the historical record,
00:28:52
Speaker
If you were living and reading the newspaper in Ireland or anywhere, you would wonder around 1940, whatever happened to Frank Riott? He went to Spain and we know that he got in prison.
00:29:09
Speaker
Is he still there? What happened? It was kind of this mystery. I think people spent a couple of decades, I think, sometime after the war unraveling the puzzle of whatever happened to Frank Ryan during the war. There were these rumors that he had gone to Germany, but they couldn't believe it. Frank Ryan become a Nazi? That doesn't seem right. There were plenty of other
00:29:31
Speaker
IRA figures who did, he wasn't the only one who ended up, you know, kind of joining forces with the Germans. There were other people who were far more gung-ho. It wasn't much ideological contortion to join forces. People like Sean Russell, who figures briefly into the book, is a real historical character and was a kind of nemesis to Frank Ryan. So the real Frank Ryan and the real Sean Russell were sent in the
00:30:01
Speaker
Sometimes late summer of 1940, I believe, were sent by a German U-boat back to Ireland, and they made it as far as the Bay of Galway, just a handful of miles off the Irish coast where the plan was to deposit them there.
00:30:19
Speaker
They were going to coordinate forces of the IRA, both wings, you know, unite the clans and then, uh, and then, you know, look for that. I think there's something so ridiculous is like, look for the flower pot in the window at the German embassy in Dublin. And that's the sign that the invasion of Britain is underway. So they get as far as the Bay of Galloway and Sean Russell dies somewhat mysteriously, though people likely think out of a perforated ulcer, stomach ruptures.
00:30:48
Speaker
bleeds of death and they turn around because of this to try to get him medical help and disaster. And so Frank Ryan, I don't know how much of the choice to turn around really is up to him in terms of historically, but the result is he finds himself back in Berlin and where he remains in the rest of the war. That was as close as he got to going home.
00:31:13
Speaker
And of course, this planned invasion keeps on getting postponed by the fall of 1940. The RAF dominates the skies. So this invasion keeps on getting put back until eventually it's completely off the table once they invade Russia.
00:31:30
Speaker
things have just totally changed, and so now he's cooling his heels. And the real Frank Ryan, I think, dies a fairly ignominious, uneventful death of various illnesses, I think, like liver failure sometime in 1944 in Dresden, if I recall. Yeah. Yeah. So I took a lot of the external events
00:31:55
Speaker
And there's something about frank ryan too that from from by all accounts. He seems to have been a kind of gregarious You know charming figure but someone who's who's both like adept at you know Or aiding, but it was a former street brawler
00:32:11
Speaker
He's originally from Limerick and then, you know, spent a fair time in Dublin. So he's- The Bronx too, right? In the Bronx or- I live in the Bronx for a while, so stuck out to me. Oh, okay. I don't think the real Frank Bryan lived in the Bronx. Okay. Well, I'm glad that that made it into your book at least. Yeah. So it was fun to kind of mash up, you know, other plausible histories into this real one.
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, so it was such an interesting figure. And when I first read about it, I think I first came across the historical figure of Frank Ryan just reading about the Spanish Civil War. I still teach in
00:32:52
Speaker
history and literature, and so I came at a lot of this stuff. I think I had done a lot of reading about interwar, wartime Europe, the Spanish Civil War, and Frank Ryan was just this figure that kind of popped into my mind. I was like, it sounds like an interesting guy. It sounds like an interesting, fraught position, and I just kind of tucked it away in the back of my brain for a while.
00:33:13
Speaker
Kept thinking, like, is there a way I could do some sort of historical project about him? But nothing really struck me. But what struck me was that there was such an opening for fiction because of, again, like I said, like the gaps in terms of we know a lot, but we also don't know a lot about, you know, what he was doing or what was there's some letters from him in Berlin. But just thinking about that kind of fraught, contorted mindset one must have, I think he probably just slowly drank himself into oblivion.
00:33:43
Speaker
is one strategy, but I thought that interesting to imagine another one. Yeah. I read that in your acknowledgement section that you're like, this was just going to be a better novel than it was going to be like a history. And I thought that was so cool. Yeah.
Frank and Adrian: A Complex Relationship
00:33:57
Speaker
Thanks. So talk about the relationship between the two of them. Yeah. They have a complicated relationship. So Pike is, so Adrian's
00:34:07
Speaker
essentially a closeted gay man who's, you know, he's gone to ground in terms of sexuality. It's completely under wraps as far as he's concerned because it's of course, you know, potentially lethal for that to get out.
00:34:21
Speaker
Whereas Frank Pike is this pansexual, larger-than-life character, especially Frank Pike as he appears in Finn McCool, that his own manuscript is his kind of alter-egos, even more larger-than-life pansexual. But even Adrian's portrayal of Frank Pike in a more down-to-earth
00:34:43
Speaker
telling is someone who's bisexual and who leverages kind of his charm and his charisma and his sex appeal to Adrian in his thrall very quickly. And Adrian starts to kind of be aware. So there's some sense, there's this tale of they're on again, off again.
00:35:06
Speaker
romantic relationship, but that's, you know, laid over this, I guess we could say workplace relationship of spy and spy handler, and a genuine friendship, but there's these, you know, these shifting power dynamics in terms of how much Adrian senses he's feeling he's being manipulated by Pike. How much of his attention, right, is there to get something he wants and then kind of dissipates as soon as Pike has gotten what he needed from him.
00:35:35
Speaker
So the relationship is, so it's a story of genuine friendship, but with these other dynamics, both the sexual and the political that are kind of the ever shifting sands between them.
00:35:50
Speaker
There was no historical evidence that this relationship that either their sexualities were either bisexual or homosexual. This was just part of the novel. No, yeah, it's just part of the novel. It's just something that I set out to say, I know I'll change them and make them gay. It's just something that kind of evolved in the writing of it and the relationship that
00:36:14
Speaker
kind of at first took me by surprise and then fell right into place and opened up a lot of interesting things to explore between them.
00:36:28
Speaker
that window back into the Weimar era, in which the kind of sexual liberation and gay culture played such a prominent part. So there was that sense of the contrast of what gets so brutally repressed and locked away under the Nazi regime.
00:36:47
Speaker
which also, I think, contributes to that sense of the contorted or torqued nature of people, both in terms of their politics and their sexuality, that the people have to perform under such a repressive regime. Now, is that part of why you've called this book The Torqued Man? That's part of it, yeah. All right. What's the other part? There's a lot of things that all came together in the sense that
00:37:14
Speaker
that phrase, the torqued man, came out of a translation of an ancient Irish epic called the Toine, which is about this, basically this amazing story of this one man
00:37:33
Speaker
you know, battle royale, one man stand against these armies of Ulster, Kuchelan, this young hero, young teenage Irish hero who kills thousands of men in battle. And this is this, you know, very important Irish epic. And so there's a translation, I believe his name is Carson Cullors, if I might be mixing up my Karsons. Anyways,
00:38:01
Speaker
This English translation where he translates this process that the hero undergoes
00:38:10
Speaker
when he uh he gets into a battle frenzy similar to like the you know the berserker vikings that uh you know may or may not have been eating hallucinogenic mushrooms or drinking strong mead but they go into this frenzy right in this kind of shape-shifting quality and they become something different well in in the toin there's this incredible these incredible passages where the the hero undergoes the torquing as he calls it and uh and he undergoes this kind of reconfiguration of his parts
00:38:40
Speaker
And so, you know, his mouth and his skeleton all get rearranged and he then becomes this like, you know, this sheer ball of terror that wreaks hell. So it was that phrase of the torquing and the torqued man, which I think the translator borrows from an ancient Roman
00:39:04
Speaker
general, who I think, trying to remember, I think he, there's, there's a story in the footnote there that I'm dimly recalling about a Roman general who was wearing a torque, right. There's also another meaning of that word is this piece of armor, right, you wear around your neck. And, and I think one of the, there's like a battle kind of mano a mano combat where a Roman
00:39:30
Speaker
general and one of these wild Celts face off against one another. And the Celts, I think the Roman general stabs the Celt and takes his torque and wears it. And after that, he's known as Torcatus. And there's a famous general called Torcatus. And so this idea of the torqued man or the torqued one just was such an evocative phrase. And then I could repurpose it to use it for this idea of kind of intellectual
00:40:00
Speaker
sexual-emotional contortions that one has to undergo in the Nazi period. And then it mashed up well with the whole Celtic theme that's told in the Finn McCool manuscript.
00:40:13
Speaker
That's so fascinating. One of the things that when I was reading this, I read that you have a PhD in European history.
Peter Mann's Academic Background
00:40:23
Speaker
As I was reading it, I was trying to think, I was like, all right, what's Peter like? What's his specialty? Is he an expert on Spain? Is he an expert on Germany? No one knows. I don't know myself. What type of stuff do you teach?
00:40:38
Speaker
So that doesn't really answer your question either. So I teach in a humanities program. It's called the master's program of liberal arts at Stanford. And it's an interdisciplinary humanities program for people who want to come back and study this stuff and get a master's, whether it's studying history, studying literature, studying art, or combining them to some effect.
00:41:07
Speaker
But they come back later in life typically, so my students are somewhere between 25 and 75.
00:41:15
Speaker
And so I love it because I don't actually teach in a traditional academic field or specialty. So my own training isn't history, but my degree is technically as a joint PhD in history and humanities. So I was always reaching for something beyond. I think what drew me to history itself as a discipline in the first place is simply that it's a discipline that can accommodate so much. You can study literature. You can study philosophy. You can study military history.
00:41:45
Speaker
under the guise of cultural history, you can study just about anything as long as it already happened. And so I've always been a generalist and interested in kind of cross-disciplinary stuff and just have resisted specialization. But I found myself at the end of grad school studying more German, Spanish, late 19th century, early 20th century. My focus was more on intellectual history.
00:42:11
Speaker
So I wrote a dissertation on the German writer Thomas Mann and the Spanish philosopher, Ortega Gasset. But I've always been interested in more than that, in the sense of grounding these ideas in the political and cultural landscape. But I think part of the reason I was drawn to fiction is because I think the novelist's tool bag, it's a grab bag. You can use whatever comes to hand, whatever is of interest, whatever fits together well.
00:42:42
Speaker
I think like in kind of collage work that can come in in fiction writing, which still like studying history comes in really handy. And I still feel like that's, you know, I spent a lot of my time doing this reading about the past, but now it's like with an eye to figuring out how to kind of recombine things to create a compelling, illuminating story. And so the program I teach and I get to teach a year of just
00:43:13
Speaker
essentially 4,000 years of history that involves maybe a quarter through a third of the world. I start with Gilgamesh and we work our way as slowly and erratically and haphazardly over 30 weeks till we get to the present and 21st century fiction. Oh, that's so cool. When I was reading, I really got the sense that you were very well versed in a lot of the
00:43:40
Speaker
literature of Europe, and you talked about intellectual history. I was very interested in what is it that makes Peter tick when I was reading your book. So that's cool, and that makes sense. Well, what are some of the other themes that you wrote about in this book that were just super interesting to you, that you wanted to get out there?
00:44:07
Speaker
Well,
Irish Mythology in the Novel
00:44:08
Speaker
there's I mean, so I was by no means an expert in the Irish myth stuff, but that was really fun to, to, you know, it's something I read the 20 years ago and then and then dig into more. And then I also have a love of Irish modernist literature. So there's a great book that I will fully admit to having stolen or artfully borrowed maybe some of
00:44:32
Speaker
some of the language. It's called At Swim, Two Birds by Flan O'Brien, in which this mythical figure, this legendary figure of Irish myth called Finn McCool also figures in. I mean, he himself is a standing figure of the Irish world of myth, but Flan O'Brien repurposes him to telling this story about
00:44:57
Speaker
He has a character in this novel who's trying to write stories and one of his characters is Finn McCool, but he's kind of using this mock heroic language to talk about more mundane 20th century circumstances, or for example, he talks about Finn McCool having a back as broad as six handball courts and things like this.
00:45:20
Speaker
So I knew that that was, I saw kind of a way in for the way Frank Pike would tell his story was he would adopt the alter ego of the mythical hero, Finn McCool, and he would use a similarly kind of mock heroic language. So I had a lot of fun doing that. I'm not sure that's necessarily a theme, but then maybe the Irish dimension. Another
The Strange Wellness Culture of Nazi Germany
00:45:42
Speaker
thing that
00:45:43
Speaker
maybe ties into this theme of the Nazi doctors that we didn't talk about yet, but which is a lot of fun for me. It was one of these, you know, these historical gems of craziness that I was happy to find a place for in the book and kind of serves as something of my MacGuffin, I suppose, is this figure of Dr. Theodore Morell, who was Hitler's personal physician. Again, a real historical figure. And there was an interesting book a number of years ago by Norman
00:46:13
Speaker
old are called Blitzed, and it's all about drugs. Drugs, right? Yeah. I remember the cover. It's like this big neon green cover in some guy's eyes or kaleidoscope. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cool little book in the sense of it does a couple of things. One of them talks about just how ubiquitous high-powered pharmaceuticals were
00:46:37
Speaker
throughout Nazi Germany and literally fueled the war effort. Like the Blitzkrieg was possible only with massive systematically administered doses of amphetamines to soldiers. But just that this kind of, you know, you know, completely glutted high powered pharmaceutical drug culture and much similar to our own was, was, you know, just part of the texture of everyday life under the Nazi regime.
00:47:04
Speaker
But the other component of this book is this strange character of Hitler's doctor who he would give Hitler all sorts of different hormone injections. And these kind of like hormonal supplements were another kind of popular feature on the landscape, which also I think it was fun to explore thinking about kind of, you know, resonances. I think, you know, part of the appeal of historical fiction is you're trying to say something about the contemporary world, but
00:47:34
Speaker
in a refracted, indirect kind of way. So the way things resonate. So something that's not our world, looks like our world. And that to me is like what's fun. So, or what makes it compelling. And so I could, you could see in Nazi Germany, kind of the roots of contemporary wellness culture, which, you know, you don't think, you don't like to think of those two together, or maybe I like to think of the two together, the dark roots of wellness, theater or morale,
00:48:03
Speaker
Not only was he giving Hitler all sorts of his own hormone concoctions, but he created this whole industry, developed his own company called the Hama Industries that were quite literally the fruits from the German campaign in the East. And so like basically from the Ukrainian planes, they would
00:48:24
Speaker
harvest the slaughter livestock and harvest their various glands in order to create these hormone concoctions from sheep vulva and bull scrotums. And so Morell was shooting this up into Hitler, but he was also selling this in all sorts of different forms. He also had like a vitamin bar called the Vitamult bar that plays a minor role in the novel. So that was really
00:48:55
Speaker
fun to weave into the texture of everyday life, but then also have morelle as this golden goose, the ultimate Nazi doctor that that Finn McCool is at least gunning for.
00:49:12
Speaker
I didn't realize in the book that those animal parts were in, I thought people talk, characters in your book talk about like bull scrotum. I think it's like donkey scrotum or something like being in those vitamins, but I didn't realize that is a real historical thing that actually happened. Yeah, at least they were in like the hormonal injections and all sorts of like movie stars, like the Oofa film stars and all people, like high-level
00:49:38
Speaker
high-level members of Hitler's cabinet, they're all getting these injections lining up to get them for morale. I don't think that the vitamin bars himself had the hormones in him, but I think, yeah, I think our character just says they taste up like ground of donkey dick, which, yeah, maybe there was a little bit in there. I don't know if you know this, but is there really still anything that, did the wellness industry take anything from the Nazis? Did they actually advance that science at all?
00:50:08
Speaker
Well, I mean, there's something that predates the Nazis. It doesn't necessarily start with them, but it is certainly a continuous cultural historical strand. It starts really at the turn of the century. In German, it's called Lebens Reform. It's this idea of this life reform movement that you see sunbathing and vegetarianism and
00:50:34
Speaker
and hiking, of course, like maybe people gone hiking before, although that is a pursuit itself. It doesn't really predate the 19th century. It's like a pastime. You don't leave the city to go out hiking in the wilderness.
00:50:47
Speaker
But the idea that you do all these things for a sense of well-being and physical health, this idea of health as the supreme value, which is something that undergirds the murderous Nazi biomedical regime, is everything is in the name of health, including killing undesirable people. So it all kind of is of a piece.
00:51:10
Speaker
And so the Nazis didn't start that logic, but they adopted it. That becomes part of their ethos, this kind of extreme wellness regime. I think it was under the Nazis that they decaffeinated coffee, another hideous crime.
00:51:31
Speaker
to the tally of horrendous deeds. But this is done in the name of health. Of course, at the same time, they're like, we'll take the caffeine out of coffee, but we'll give you much more powerful amphetamines, way more powerful than caffeine that you can also drink down with your decaffeinated coffee. It's crazy. Well, what are you hoping that when somebody reads your book, what are you hoping that readers take away? Oh, man,
Historical Narratives for Modern Readers
00:52:00
Speaker
that's a tough question.
00:52:02
Speaker
Yeah, I don't want this to sound glib. I don't mean it in a superficial way, but I mean my ultimate aim is to entertain. I want them to be captivated. I want them to just be caught up in a story, but I want them to be caught up in a story, I suppose, that seems like it's revealing something about the world that it portrays that they didn't know that takes them by surprise. So that history appears in a slightly different light to them.
00:52:31
Speaker
But and then maybe in turn their own world, their own sense of how they orient themselves in the present right in relation to the past now feels a little different. So, yeah, some some sort of salutary estrangement, I guess would be the ultimate goal while while being really delighted. Very cool. Well, Peter, this has been a fantastic interview. Like I said, I was so fascinated by your book and it was a real joy to read.
00:53:02
Speaker
What are you working on next? You mentioned that you're on a different book project. What are you working on?
Peter Mann's Upcoming Novel
00:53:07
Speaker
I am. Yeah. I'm working on a another novel that has an espionage dimension and it is also, it's set in the early days of World War II, 1939, 1940, but
00:53:21
Speaker
The war is still there, but it's slightly more adjacent in the sense that most of my story takes place in San Francisco. So America is not yet at war, and it really concerns the disappearance of a celebrity writer-adventurer.
00:53:40
Speaker
who's, again, similar to the way I drew a story around the real character of Frank Ryan. There was this real adventure writer named Richard Halliburton, who was a really popular writer in the 20s and 30s and became- Was he related to the oil family? Not that I know of, no, I don't think so. But he, yeah, so I changed his name to get rid of all those associations.
00:54:04
Speaker
But he was one of these guys who wrote kind of like these boys life adventures types and then his last big kind of...
00:54:14
Speaker
gimmick, his last big adventure to try to stay relevant was in 1939, he tried to sail a traditional Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco, where he was supposed to arrive and be, you know, fetted by the World's Fair in San Francisco and Treasure Island. And, of course, it didn't work out that way. He disappeared at sea and no one ever heard from him again. So I'm exploring similar to Frank Ryan. I said, well, whatever happened to a
00:54:40
Speaker
that kind of figure and what kind of stories can we tell around that man's disappearance. Wow. Well, if he makes it into the war, I hope you'll come back on this podcast and talk about it. Or maybe that's not the way you're going. There's enough war in there. I could justify doing that. Okay. That's great. It only has to be war related. Yes. For this show. Well, Peter, if people want to follow you, follow your work, are you on social media? How can people find you?
00:55:09
Speaker
Instagram occasionally, having an account there, it's pmaninstagrams, not the most readily typable account, but maybe the best one-stop shopping is just go to petermanbooks.com and that links to various things, including my art website, if you want to see some different history of literature related comics. Yeah. And I would, again, I would recommend everybody out there to
00:55:37
Speaker
Check out some of Peter's other art because it is really cool. Well, Peter Mann, the torqued man, go buy a coffee, go check it out from your library. What an interesting story. And Peter, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks a lot, AJ. It's been a pleasure.