Soon after accepting a position as German instructor at a tiny college in the remote hills of Kentucky, Colin Ritter takes on a challenge posed by the founder of the college over a hundred years earlier: if he can use his exceptional talent as a puzzle master to solve a convoluted series of riddles, he stands to become the owner of a work of art of incalculable value.
As he slowly makes progress, he is faced with another problemÑthat a colleague of his may be harboring several paintings appropriated from German Jewish collectors during the Third Reich. With ColinÕs subsequent amateur detective work comes the belated realization that he has put his life on the line.
Norman Watt taught German language and literature courses at St. Olaf College from 1966 to 2000 and was part of the collegeÕs ÒGreat ConversationÓ program. Since retiring, he has translated numerous historical and family documents from German to English. His novel Fanatic is currently being translated into German.
As a German historian who lives half the year in the United States and the other half in Germany, I was impressed by Norman WattÕs recently published novel Fanatic, both for its evocative setting on an idyllic American college campus and for the variety of German and German/American topics it presents. These range from the quirky founder of the college himself, who fought in both the German revolution of the mid-nineteenth-century and the American Civil War, his enormous collection of artworks by the great Renaissance master Albrecht DŸrer, and his creation of a convoluted puzzle which, over a hundred years later, still has not been solved.
These aspects form the backdrop for the contemporary storyline of Fanatic and its protagonist, a newly-hired professor of German who ends up, step by step, trying to make sense of the many stages of the puzzleÑand, simultaneously, of the ins and outs of his own love life. Along the way he learns of a recent and as yet unsolved murder on the campus grounds, and subsequently begins to investigate certain activities of one of his colleagues, who happens to be the son of a Nazi SS officer. This he feels driven to do, even though he realizes that he may be endangering his life by doing so.
All in all, a compelling read!
Dr. Joachim (yogi) Reppmann, Stoltenberg Institute for German-American Forty-eighter Studies.