Song Before It Is Sung

"When Elya Mendel first met Axel von Gottberg at Oxford in the early 1930s, the talented young Rhodes Scholars both thought they had the world figured out - until Hitler came to power and their lives took vastly different courses. Elya, a strict man of theory and ideas, remained at the university, while Axel, to the dismay of his friend, returned to his native Germany to help fight against Hitler and the rise of Nazism, and was brutally executed for his role in a failed assassination attempt." "Sixty years later, Elya, now a distinguished professor, leaves behind a collection of papers and letters to a former student, Conrad Senior, and asks him to make sense of them, particularly Elya's repudiation of his old friend, whom he had wrongfully condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. But the more Conrad tries to uncover the truth, the more complex - and contentious - he finds the relationship between the two friends, especially in their involvement with two beautiful English cousins, Rosamund and Elizabeth, who threatened to tear the two men apart before the war. As Conrad becomes more obsessed with the past, his marriage to his wife, Francine, begins to fall apart, a striking historic parallel to the deterioration of Axel and Elya's friendship over a clash of ideals. Weaving darkly through these complex stories is an infamous film of Axel's execution - a film which Conrad is desperate to locate, for reasons he can barely understand himself. But is he prepared to handle what he ultimately finds?"--BOOK JACKET.Cartwright, Justin is the author of 'Song Before It Is Sung ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781596912687 and ISBN 1596912685.