The Seduction of Eva Volk [Kindle Edition]

C.D. Baker (Author)

Book Description

In World War II, American soldiers were shocked to discover thousands of German POW's carrying New Testaments. Christians serving Hitler? Never before undertaken in a novel, 'The Seduction of Eva Volk' explores the reality of this no-so-simple paradox from the German point of view.
Through the eyes of young Eva Volk, the alluring charm of the Hitler movement is personified in a lover. Desperately seeking wholeness in her broken world, she is quickly swept away by the passions of love and war...until she finds herself facing the consequences of blindness. Her's is a story that serves as a warning to us all.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Baker's comprehensive research offers an incredibly accurate picture of village life under National Socialism. The American reader may be astonished at the German perspective as historical certainties lose their accustomed contour." Johann Voss, author of 'Black Edelweiss' and veteran of the Waffen SS.

"Uncomfortable as it is, this novel deserves an honored place in Holocaust literature." Rabbi Howard Abel Hirsch of the Center for Jewish-Christian Dialogue in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

From the Author

While staying with distant relatives in Germany, I was surprised at my reaction to seeing pictures of World War II veterans sitting atop the piano and tables. I looked at the faces in uniform...they looked like me! Yet weren't they supposed to be monsters? So I began to consider how it was that village men and women who were decent, civilized, even Christian, could be caught up in the Hitler Movement that swept Germany in the 1930's. The answers surprised me.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 620 KB
• Print Length: 394 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1931587507
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004SOZ9R8
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #226,903 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Human Portrait of Self-Deception, Denial and the Reality of Truth December 26, 2009

By Alan Crippen

Format:Paperback

The Seduction of Eva Volk
Years ago I remember my fascination with journalist William Shirer's book The Nightmare Years 1930-1940. His aptly titled story is a personal memoir of his life as an American foreign correspondent in Europe during the rise of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich. Shirer's record of events reads like an adventure novel beginning with an ambush in troubled Afghanistan's Kyber Pass. Throughout the book Shirer grapples with the ideal of truth, its pursuit, knowability, application and relevance, especially to oneself. Alas, with the same earnest seriousness of Shirer author C.D. Baker offers a novel of like gravity with all the credibility of an historical narrative for those "nightmare years." A gripping yarn told from the perspective of a bucolic German village on the banks of the Mosel River in the Reisling grape growing county, Baker's The Seduction of Eva Volk grapples with the same questions about truth, especially its grip on the darkest regions of the human heart's capacity for self-deception. How is it that Germany and its good people (at the time a largely Christian nation and culture) could have embraced Hitler's Nazi regime of evil? How is it that the good German people could have tolerated and even participated in a government that was directly or indirectly responsible for the slaughter of 28.5 million souls, including the systematic and technologically efficient genocide of 5.8 million European Jews? These questions have haunted historians, moral philosophers, ethicists, and everyone willing to grapple with the nightmare years of Germany's Third Reich. Baker has the courage to tackle these questions through the multi-dimensional characters of everyday people in everyday places, the likes of whom could be our own neighbors. In doing so he offers a credible answer to the hard questions as well as a disturbing portait of the bad politics, even deathly politics for which normal, everyday people are capable not only of tolerating, but of serving with a morally ambiguous complicity. The Seduction of Eva Volk is a masterpiece as a moral essay about human nature in its depths of depravity, and it is simultaneously a compelling commentary on the capacity of human moral immagination to know the truth in the depths of one's conscience and to overcome deceit and self-deception. Although the truth may ultimately set one free, it is all too often not without paying a very high price for being decieved and for psychologically sustaining self-deception by denial.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars startling insight December 10, 2009

By Stephen H. Smith

Format:Paperback

The Seduction of Eva Volk offers a startling insight into the tinderbox of suspicion, desperation, frustration and hatred that was endemic in pre WWII Germany. It is a story of blind faith and the resulting horrors in a society willing to write a political blank check. The reader will be surprised, even dismayed, by certain uncomfortable truths behind the rise of Nazi power. In an elegant narrative Baker forces us to accept that things may not always be quite as black and white as we have been taught. As the first American born in Germany after WWII I think this story is long overdue.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping Tale with a Compelling Theme December 21, 2009

By R. Schuler

Format:Paperback

The Seduction of Eva Volk will grip readers with the pace and tension of its plot and captivate them with fully human characters, struggling with the complexities of life as they are caught up in one of the great tragic dramas of history. The thoughtful will find here a work of fine literature that is unafraid to delve into the flawed nature of humanity, so that we might better understand ourselves, and the heights and depths to which we as individuals, and collectively as a society, are capable. Baker's brave work allows the reader to draw his or her own parallels with contemporary situations, by revealing that the full scope of history must be coaxed into consciousness if individuals - and human societies - are to escape subtle yet deadly descents into evil, and instead draw forth for emulation the inspirational and heroic.

More About the Author

C.D. Baker's first novel, 'A Journey of Souls,' was released in 2000 and re-released in 2004 as 'Crusade of Tears'-- a Christee Award nominee. He has written seven historical novels and two books of Christian reflections. He has a Master's degree in Theology from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Baker's specialty is the discovery of the untold story.

Baker writes from his small farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he raises livestock with an interest in natural/organic methods and a passion for humane treatment.