Although Gretchen grows increasingly uncomfortable with what’s happening within the party, it isn’t until Daniel Cohen, a handsome Jewish reporter, suggests her father was not a hero but a murder victim, that the scales fall from her eyes.īlankman felt the manuscript was ready for submission in 2012 when she learned her “dream agent,” Tracey Adams of Adams Literary, would be offering critiques at an SCBWI conference in Arlington, Va. In the novel, Gretchen is a “favorite pet” of “Uncle Dolf,” who befriended the family after Gretchen’s father took a fatal bullet meant for Hitler during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Because so many of the characters were real people, what I wound up having to do was write between the lines of history.” “I knew I needed the freedom of a fictional character in order to tell the story I wanted to tell,” Blankman recalls, “but it didn’t hit me until I started revising what an ambitious project I had taken on. So intrigued was Blankman that in the months that followed, she created a stand-in for the real Geli: Gretchen Müller, the main character in her debut novel, Prisoner of Night and Fog (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, May). “She’s just a footnote in the history books, but I could not stop thinking about what it must have been like to be a teenage girl in inner circle at a time when the Nazi Party was rising to power,” she says. Geli’s tragic story “set my mind on fire,” Blankman recalls.
She’d been an English and history major as an undergrad at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and wrote her thesis on World War II, so she dug out some old books including Ronald Hayman’s Hitler and Geli, which examines the passionate, doomed relationship between the future dictator and his much-younger half-niece. “All I wanted was nonfiction because I needed facts to keep my brain from dissolving while I was home full-time with a baby,” she says. While on maternity leave in 2010, Anne Blankman, a public librarian in York County, Va., found herself craving a particular kind of read.
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