Nor do we get a sense that they've been overly concerned by the state thuggery, mass imprisonments, Aryan ideology, Nazi rallies, and the very public persecution of Jews and others. It's hard to accept that both men would have chosen to live under the tyrannical regime of the Third Reich. And while Sid's slangy vernacular is often charismatic, elsewhere the novel is problematic. But as black jazz musicians they are already a familiar motif in American culture, and there's a touch of central casting about their portrayal. It's also about his strained relationship with Chip. The men decide to visit him.ĭespite the book's blurb tantalising us with promises of a black German experience, this novel is really about Sid and his version of events that led up to Hiero's arrest. Chip, a celebrated jazz drummer, also has betrayal issues, and has discovered that Hiero, who's been presumed dead for so long, is actually alive in Poland. Sid, now in his 80s, harbours a terrible secret of betrayal. Sid, the narrator, moves the story, set primarily in Paris and Berlin, back and forth from the onset of the war to Berlin in 1992, where he and Chip are guests at the premiere of a documentary about Hiero, who has become a jazz legend. Hiero is arrested, and we later hear that he was incarcerated in a concentration camp and apparently died not long after his release. As they struggle to get forged exit visas to leave France, Hiero and Sid, rather implausibly, roam the dangerous, abandoned streets, despite knowing they are at great risk of being rounded up by the Gestapo. Along with two of his fellow band mates, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African-Americans, Hiero escapes to Paris in 1939 where, when war is declared and the Germans invade, they go into hiding. Only 19, he is a member of the Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band forbidden to play live in late 1930s Berlin because the Nazis have banned their "degenerate" music. Hiero is a jazz trumpeter extraordinaire. In this novel, the fictional Hieronymous "Hiero" Falk, around whom the plot revolves, is one of them – a Mischling or "half-breed" from the Rhineland. A fro-Germans don't usually get a look-in when the narratives of Nazi Germany are told, yet the black presence in Germany goes back to at least the 18th century, and later waves of African immigrants produced German-born offspring who, by the interwar years, numbered several thousand.
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