Nathaniel Lande

This is a beautifully written, well researched novel about WWII told through the eyes of Max who is a teenager when the novel begins but becomes part of the resistance as the Nazi regime takes over his country. Max and his friends and family all connect through music - at times it is the only way they can keep their sanity in their world gone crazy.

1939 in Prague - Max Mueller lives with his father Viktor, a world famous conductor. He isn't Jewish but has been taught to respect everyone no show more matter what their religion or heritage. He and his father are very close and his father has instilled the love of music into him and he has become a pianist and is a piano tuner on the side. The two most important people in his life are his best friend David and the girl he is falling in love with, Sophie. As the Nazis invade Prague and change the life that Max has always known, the truths that he has carried since childhood come into conflict. His father gets drafted into the German Army and becomes friends with a high ranking Nazi. As their friend ship continues, Viktor gets more involved in the Nazi party and helping them with their propaganda. Max is confused by this change in his father who had always taught him to be accepting of everyone and he begins to rely more on his friends. After both David and Sophie are sent to live in Terezin which was referred to as a spa area but was actually one of the first concentration camps. Max goes there to live outside the camp through the help of his father's Nazi cronies but he goes into the camp as much as possible to spend time with David and Sophie and to help them and others where he can. This camp was known for known for its relatively rich cultural life, including concerts, lectures, and clandestine education for children. As conditions worsen and people start to disappear on the trains to Auschwitz, Max and David know that the only way there can stay alive is to escape...but is it even possible?

I read a lot of WWII fiction and found this one exceptional. The writing is beautiful, the friendship between Max, David and Sophie is very honest and real and the way that music ties everything together throughout the novel was outstanding. This is a WWII novel that I will long remember. Be sure to have tissue close at hand while you read this book.

Note: Be sure to read the author's notes at the end to see which of the characters in the novel are based on real people and their effect on WWII.

Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own. show less

About halfway through this novel, sometime in 1940, the protagonist’s best friend asks him, “Max, exactly how stupid are you?” Since I’d been wondering the same thing for a couple hundred pages, I had to laugh.

Lande aims to tell how the Holocaust unfolded in Czechoslovakia, especially in Terezín (Theresienstadt), but Max Mueller is a rickety vehicle for that story. What fourteen-year-old growing up in Prague during those catastrophic years would not know what the Gestapo did for a show more living? How can Max, who counts Jews as his closest friends, not know what a rabbi is?

Further, when he asks these pat questions, an adult tells him he’s getting good at conducting interviews. (Max makes his inquiries as a would-be reporter; the power of a free press is a theme that Lande swings at the reader like a two-by-four.) Throw in that pianist Max, before he volunteers (!) to live in Terezín, was somehow, at age twelve, the best piano tuner in Prague; that this job led him to befriend Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi intelligence officer; and that Max’s father, Viktor, a famous orchestra conductor, befriends Heydrich too, gets attached to his staff, and uses his alleged influence to mitigate the Holocaust when he can. I don’t think so.

Lande relies heavily on figures like Heydrich, Winston Churchill, Hitler, the rabbi and thinker Leo Baeck, and Raoul Wallenberg. But the narrative embracing them proceeds without tension or conflict to speak of, in which the villains pull punches right and left, and the characters are opinions, placards without inner lives. Instead of natural dialogue, While the Music Played offers lectures, which is how Max’s cluelessness comes in handy. People are always informing him, and he’s remarkably slow to learn.

It’s not just that the lectures include state secrets, propping up the conceit that places a young boy at the epicenter of history. These information dumps do no service to the themes involved, which include politics, history, the nature of Judaism, and philosophy; the most breathtakingly glib treatment concerns Heydrich. Heydrich’s father was a composer, and Lande invokes that lineage to portray the son as a music lover too, which allows Max to wonder how the man whose passion he shares can also appear to sanction objectionable policies.

The power of music despite degradation and suffering and the disconnect between a cultured Germany and its murderous activities are worthy themes. But Lande could have written them by, say, giving Max a beloved piano teacher who turns out to be a rabid racist and ultranationalist. Rather, the author has chosen to illustrate his themes with historical “stars,” who make up such an improbable constellation, you have the feeling that the novel takes place in an alternate universe.

To return to Heydrich, known as “Hangman Heydrich” by the people he oppressed, Nazi contemporaries described him as “diabolical” and “icy.” Just what you’d expect from one of the two or three most ruthless figures in the Third Reich: the head of the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst, a rival security service to the SS, Heinrich Himmler’s organization, with whom Heydrich had a famous power struggle. Heydrich framed top generals to destroy their careers, masterminded Kristallnacht, devised the Einsatzgruppen (the death squads sent east), and convened the top-secret Wannsee Conference, which codified the until-then haphazard policy of the Final Solution and organized its further implementation, a fact that only emerged after the war.

He would never have befriended Max, “bargained” with his father, or even hired him. More likely, he’d have had the Muellers killed, if he sensed free-thinking or disloyalty (and they’re none too swift at dissembling). In any event, he certainly wouldn’t have told Max in summer 1939 that Germany was about to invade Poland, or conveniently dropped the news that the Final Solution was coming, leaving Max, ever breathlessly inquisitive, to wonder what that meant.

While reading, I went back and forth as to whether the narrative intends this innocence, taking a childlike worldview. You have to wonder about a fictional atmosphere in which nobody even thinks about sex, let alone has any; nobody swears; and where nineteen people in twenty have only good intentions. Lande’s characters love (or hate) on sight, escape fist-shaking villains with regularity, succeed at whatever they turn their hands to, and receive much-needed medical supplies and food by pulling invisible strings.

Toward the teenage characters, adults are remarkably pliant and encouraging, acceding to all demands, enlisting them in the fight against Nazism without hesitation, and offering fulsome praise for all they say or do, as with the question about rabbis. But teenagers don’t act the way Lande portrays them and probably wouldn’t recognize themselves in this narrative, whose unreality feels neither whimsical nor compelling.

I think that historical novelists have a duty to history, to grasp what the record means even as they reinterpret it or blur its actuality. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy or alternate history, but this novel fits neither category; and its careless, superficial approach trivializes its subject. show less

Book received from Edelweiss.

I loved this book on how the various countries used propaganda to their advantage and occasionally disadvantage, yes things did backfire on them sometimes. It shows just how much "spin" has always been a part of politics and the deceptions some politicians willingly use to promote their agenda. I liked how the book was split into sections and focused on each country, only skipping around to show how well the propaganda worked compared to the same event being show more portrayed differently by another country. I felt it was a great introduction to a part of history that doesn't seem to get discussed often. show less

What a wonderful book to go through! So many ideas for vacations, stuff to see, do, buy. And the judgements are pretty darned good. My son took me to a place where I had the best ice cream I've ever eaten. Then he told me that was the ice cream ranked Number One in this book. Lots of fun. The drawback is that the places are scattered all over the world, and so there are lots of ideas for where to go, but it costs a fortune. On the other hand, there seem to be concentrations of locations on show more the east and west coasts, so if you live out there the book is especially useful. Living in Wisconsin, my opportunities to go to even to these places in the U.S. are somewhat limited. (Sigh.) show less