The Phoenix
A Novel About the Hindenberg
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1947, ten years after the famous zeppelin Hindenburg burst spectacularly into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The cause of the disaster is still a mystery. The airship was a symbol of world peace and German technological prowess and was carrying important American industrialists and high-ranking Nazi officers. The reasons to think the crash was something other than a horrible accident are manifold and contradictory. Birger Lund, a survivor, suspects sabotage.
Lund learns that Edmund Boysen, the officer at the controls at the time of the explosion, also survived the disaster and has retreated to his childhood home, an isolated xenophobic island where the politics of Nazi Germany live on. Seeking answers, Lund tracks him there.
And there the reader ventures into Boysen’s discovery of the science and wonder of the fabulous dirigible, written with the authority that only one who has lived with the mythic tales of the Hindenburg could understand. For the author, Henning Boëtius, is the son of the only living member of the crew of the Hindenburg–the man who, indeed, was at the controls.
In a fast-paced narrative that unfolds against the background of fascist Germany, The Phoenix combines a love story, an exploration of the physics of air travel, and a frightening re-creation of–after the sinking of the Titanic–perhaps the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. This is historical fiction at its best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1937 Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, N.J., has been the subject of numerous books, several feature films and countless rumors. The mystery of the horrific zeppelin fire that claimed 35 lives is resurrected in this dark and brooding story about a survivor obsessed with finding out the cause of the catastrophe. Bo tius, a popular German author, is also the son of one of the survivors of the Hindenburg and was raised on his father's stories of the event. The powerful tale he crafts here tells of a man who rises from the Hindenburg's ashes, equipped with a new face, a new identity and a new purpose in life. Birger Lund is a passenger on the Hindenburg's last flight across the Atlantic in May 1937. He miraculously survives the crash and fire, assumes the identity of a dead passenger and spends 10 years doggedly searching for answers to the questions of how and why. His search ends in 1947 when he finally locates one of the surviving airship officers Nazi enthusiast Edmund Boysen, the man at the zeppelin's controls when the crash occurred by tracking him to a sinister, isolated island in the North Sea. Bo tius tells this story through both men, cleverly exploring the theories of what caused the disaster: natural lightning activity, crew or passenger carelessness and the more ominous one of sabotage. Anti-Nazis, the Gestapo, secret agents and some other unusual travelers on the passenger list add great drama and suspense. Bo tius has created an original plot peopled with intensely realized characters, set against a vivid backdrop of prewar politics and the romance of zeppelin flight.
