The Madman & His Mistress

By Roswitha McIntosh

Book Overview

In Vienna, a city of opulence and abject poverty, a pageant of blond and blue-eyed men and maidens incites a madman's fantasy and becomes his obsession. He dreams of power and glory. His first stormy... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0741439719
• ISBN13: 9780741439710
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: Infinity Publishing (PA)
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Book begging to be made into a movie

This is a rare look into German life in Germany during WW II. I loved this book. I couldn't put it down. This book and the author, Roswitha McIntosh, put a human, German, face on an inhuman time and place. The names are real, the events are real, the people described are family and friends of the author's - people she knew while growing up during the Hitler regime. It is a well written, compelling, fictionalized story of Roswitha Leuthold McIntosh's childhood; full of compassion, sorrow, struggles, pain and triumph. There is such detail given in this book that you live in those times as you read the book. For me, the thought was always, what would I have done in those times? Would I have the courage her father showed? The wisdom her mother had? Would I have been able to survive, much less with the integrity and compassion of this family? I don't know. But thank God they did. This book is such a testament to the human spirit. I keep seeing it as a movie. With a decent screenplay, it could easily become a classic, a movie to be seen many times over. I hope someone picks it up.

History as it was lived - should be 5 star, but mistyped!

If you are expecting yet another analysis of the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun, you will, thankfully, be sorely disappointed. The title is misleading: the mistress in question is not Eva Braun, but the starving and discontented German people, who bowed down to the madman's will to power. This is a World War II memorial, perhaps a thinly disguised memoir, and a well written, thoughtful, gripping read. The actual subject is the life of a family with young children - a normal, albeit upper middle class family, who steadfastly refused to subscribe to what was presented as "just a formality" - membership of the Nazi Party, and the consequences of that refusal - from gradual expropriation, marginalisation, and finally exile. This book is not about the perils of warfare, or the horrors of the concentration camps - but it is written from the perspective of children growing up through that era - barely teen-agers at war's end. It gives life to Elias Canetti's immortal, and prescient phrase: "Behold the revenge of the lower middle class"; in the book, the ruling Nazis, or at least the ones who poisoned daily life at every level, were self-seeking, greedy, small-time crooks, thugs and chancers. This is exemplified not only by the figure of the main protagonists' in-law, who uses his position to his own advantage, but also in the experience of a family friend, who encountered Hitler as a derelict in Vienna, and then found himself a target for the demagogue's wrathful need to destroy anyone who could tarnish his image of himself. What happened to normal German citizens who exercised their moral principles, during the 12 years of Hitler's rule? What was their daily experience, how did they perceive the status quo? Seen through the children's eyes, the emphasis is on fear, silence, and increasing deprivation. Obviously, if as a child, all you know is totalitarianism, that way of life represents normality of a kind - it is the universally shared principle. The strength of this book is its refusal to succumb to the emotional pitfalls of hindsight: the barely perceived, but dreaded horrors of the camps, the disappearance of valued friends, are related in the same kind of fearful half-tones with which these news must have been imparted at the time. Small kindnesses and big acts of courage are also described - in the same low-key, matter-of-fact tone. If the Nazi regime comes over as a fog of enforced belief mixed with fear and privation, the result of being an unwilling, unwitting member of that nation, the experience of the Russian occupation is recounted with a palpable level of fear. The enemy alien, as opposed to the enemy within; silence, invisibility and self-reliance, which were once the watchwords for relative safety, were replaced by the fear of random retaliation, with danger averted at every corner. Salvation, once again, came from basic human communication, kindness, and the recognition that a man with a gun is also a human being, and j

Have We Learned the Lessons of History?

A book that reads like a novel and resonates with truth, The Madman and His Mistress is both a searing indictment of war and a heart-warming story of courage, survival, triumph and indomitable faith. Amidst the atrocities of the Hitler years, many decent people still chose kindness over cruelty, integrity over corruption, and faith over fear. The author (Roswitha McIntosh) lived through these harrowing times. Born when Hitler came to power, she endured 9 years of his reign. Her story is personal, practical, and compelling, with a warning for our time. Will we heed it?

facinating

This is a book that should be on the best seller list; I couldn't put it down. It was facinating readng and most informative. It was interesting to look behind the facade of the man and why he accomplished what he did and why he failed. I truly enjoyed the book and its many colorful episodes of real life.

Fascinating true war drama

This is one of those books you find hard to put down. Though written as wartime thriller, it is a true story of the life of the author's family in Germany under Hitler. The author's meticulous research into the details of Nazi governance gives us a vivid picture of what living under a dictatorship is like, not only during WWII, but in the chaotic upheaval of postwar Germany.