Destiny Express

By Howard Rodman and Howard A. Rodman

Book Overview

Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as "daringly imagined and darkly romantic--a moral thriller," Destiny Express captures both the glamour and the terror of an era, dramatizing the perilous moment when art, politics, and destiny converged on the tracks out of Berlin.

Berlin, the last day of February, 1933. The Reichstag lies in smoldering ruins, a new world about to spring from its ashes. And now for German filmmakers the choices are stark: stay and collaborate with a government that believes in cinema's power to shape reality, or leave everything behind. Destiny Express is the story of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, husband and wife, director and screenwriter--together, they made some of the greatest films of all time: M, Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse. As each day is torn from the calendar they watch as one by one Bertolt Brecht, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, take the next train out. Destiny Express follows Lang, von Harbou, and a host of real and fictional others--novelist-turned-minister-of-culture Joseph Goebbels, American caf Surrealist Sam Harrison, Mercedes racing champ Otto Merz, film star Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a pair of not-so-secret police--as their paths converge, intertwine, and separate across the grid of Berlin, from the artificial daylight of the UFA soundstage to the artificial night of Berlin's most exclusive and decadent nightclubs.

Harsh lights, long shadows: the perfect setting for a deeply researched, deftly imagined tale, as one character puts it, of "crime, gambling, cocaine, jazz, stock exchange maneuvers, smuggling, hypnosis, counterfeiting, violence, Expressionism." Destiny Express is the story of a marriage at the end of its passion, at the edge of history--all at the end of an era when film was to mean more than it ever would again.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1644285533
• ISBN13: 9781644285534
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Rare Bird Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Stylish and wonderfully vivid, but lacks follow-through

Howard Rodman's stylish novel about the relationship between Friz Lang and Thea von Harbou in pre-war Nazi Germany is a swirling melange of cigarettes, adultery, boredom, disaffection, creative arrogance, longing, helplessness and pretense. His deliberately complex, disjointed writing style -- while feeling slightly affected at times -- does a wonderful job of capturing the ennui, anxiety and overt fashionability of 1930's Berin. The pacing is slow and lingers on details, both vital and trivial. This languid pace is rarely bothersome, instead invites the reader to laze in the richness of scene that results. The bad news is that the plot gets lost under this capricious writing, especially towards the end of the book. I am sure this is deliberate, and it's admittedly effective at times. But the major discoveries and decisions that drive the story are often only hinted at or noted in passing while the author is busy describing other minor thoughts and scene details at length. The result is a book that is luxurious and though-provoking, but ultimately less satisfying at the finish than it should be.