The man in the fire

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Der Mann im Feuer is a book for young people by Willi Fährmann and the first volume in the Fink saga, which was published by Arena Verlag between 1991 and 2001 . It describes the protagonist's life in the last months of the Weimar Republic . The following volumes are called Unter der Asche die Gut , You woke the dawn (published in 1999) and The Hour of the Lark (published in 2001) and describe the life of Christian and his family well into the 1950s .

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Sixteen-year-old Christian Fink is an outsider in his village in the Catholic Paderborn region . He doesn't know why the other boys beat him up and call him a bastard so often. Only from Linda Hellmann, a friend of his mother's and Christian's godmother at the same time, did he learn that his mother was impregnated against her will in 1917 by a young man - from the arch-Protestant principality of Lippe - who was drafted as a soldier soon after and never left reported to her again. She later married the groom of a large farm in the village, so that her son was born in wedlock. The talk about the sudden wedding remained, however. Now he also understands the attitude of his father, by whom he was often abused and beaten up too, while Christian's step-sister Anna, as his biological daughter, was always the father's favorite. Contrary to all the customs of the time, she dreams of training as a watchmaker.

Soon after, Christian has the opportunity to move out of the village: He joins the brick column from Lippe, in which Martin Hellmann, Linda's husband, works as a burner for the summer, and moves with the men to the Ruhr area looking for work. There they are quickly attacked by the locals as intruders who want to dispute the already scarce work for the locals. In view of the six million unemployed, the anger against the "foreign workers" grows. He soon notices that the different political currents that dominated Germany as a whole at this time were also widely spread among his new colleagues: While most of the members of the column belonged to the political center, two convinced communist Hermann Lotzki were also working SA men in the Ziegler group. In addition to the unfamiliar work, Christian also has to deal with all these often contradicting views. It becomes really difficult for him when he finds out that Edmund Corbes, the master bricklayer, is his biological father. He secretly swears revenge on him for the shame he brought on him and his mother. However, he does not find a way to do this during the campaign. When, towards the end of the campaign, word got around that a radical group wanted to blow up the brick oven and Corbes had assigned Christian of all people as a guard for that night, the latter suspected that his father wanted to get rid of him and decided to put him on the oven as well to trick into. But in the end it is Corbes of all people who saves Christian from blowing up the stove. In addition, he now offers him to finance a visit to a bricklayer school.

Locations

The story initially takes place in the fictional village of "Kirchwüsten" on the border between the then Prussian province and the Principality of Lippe , in the shadow of Velmerstot and on the Paderborn-Detmold railway line . The real village of Sandebeck should have served as a model .

The main part of the Romas takes place in a brickworks in the north of Duisburg, more precisely on "Hoffschen Strasse" between the Beeck and Beeckerwerth districts. Here, too, a real brickworks should have been the inspiration: Their clay pit is still right next to the A42 .

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