Category: Adult Fiction 18+, 268 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance
Content Rating: PG-13 +M: The book is centered around two romantic relationships in Vienna from the annexation of Austria by Germany to the Soviet liberation of Vienna in 1945. The main character, a virtuoso violinist who played for Vienna Philharmonic and after the war busks for a living, endures a concentration camp where he suffers physical and mental abuse. Close attention is paid to the history of the period.
The year is 1938 and Austria has been annexed by Nazi Germany.
Klaus Lehner plays first violin for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and when the concertmaster is amongst other Jews expelled from Philharmonic, he sees the opportunity for a position he covets He is bitterly disappointed when he is passed over.
In the wake of his disappointment, Klaus’s lover Eva, a virtuoso cellist, urges him to become a soloist. To determine whether he is merely brilliant or can truly move an audience she tasks him with mastering difficult pieces by Bach and Paganini, and with fathering her baby – both of which he does.
Meanwhile, at home, Klaus’s wife Helga gives birth to their firstborn.
When Eva’s Nazi husband finds out about the love affair, he has Klaus arrested and sent to a Mauthausen subcamp to supervise Ukrainian laborers. Amidst the suffering, Klaus composes a tone poem, Silence Interrupted, translating his nightmares into sound.
After the camp is liberated, Klaus returns to a war-torn Vienna devastated by American bombers and occupied by the Soviet army. He makes a living busking in front of the Soviet Vienna City Kommandatura. Klaus faces a choice between the two women he left behind.
Richard Tomlinson’s working life has been divided between being an academic and an urban policy consultant.
As an academic, either in full-time or visiting capacity, he has been located in Australia at the University of Melbourne (Chair of the Urban Planning Program); in South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand; and in the USA at Columbia and New School Universities and MIT, and in think tanks at the Brookings Institution and the Wilson Center; and at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy. A Fulbright Scholar, he did his PhD at Rutgers University.
As a post-1990 consultant based in Johannesburg, Richard’s clients in Southern Africa included the post-apartheid South African government, various local and international NGOs, the World Bank, USAID and the private sector, during which time he also facilitated multi-party negotiations. He has also worked with community organizations.
Richard’s current activities depend on the weather: kayaking, swimming, hiking and mountain climbing and writing. Surfing has given way to age.
First Violin, set in a wonderful city, Vienna, is his debut novel.
