The Writers' Castle

A gripping, fresh approach to the Nuremberg Trial, told through the stories of the many great writers who came to witness it

'Ranging across the (sometimes shifting) viewpoints of the different writers gathered in Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr complicates the story in small but important ways... This readable history of the view from the castle shows the many ways in which human beings process transgression, violence and trauma'

TLS

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Nuremberg, 1946. As the trials of Nazi war criminals begin, some of the world's most famous writers and reporters gather in the ruined German city. Among them are Rebecca West, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, Erika Mann and Janet Flanner.

Crammed together in the press camp at Schloss Faber-Castell, where reporters sleep ten to a room, complain about the food and argue in the lively bar, they each try to find words for the unprecedented events they are witnessing. Here, tensions simmer between Soviet and Western journalists, unlikely affairs begin, stories are falsified and fabricated - and each reporter is forever changed by what they experience.

As Uwe Neumahr builds an engrossing group portrait of the luminaries at Nuremberg, we are taken to the heart of the political and cultural conflicts of the time - observing history at the very moment it was being written.