Germania Book

"In their youth, Manni and Franzi, together with their brothers, Ziggy and Sebastian, captured Germany's collective imagination as the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers - one of the most popular vaudeville acts of the old Weimar days. The ensuing years have, however, found the Jewish brothers estranged and ensconced in various occupations as the war is drawing near its end and a German surrender is imminent. Manni is traveling through the Ruhr Valley with Albert Speer, who is intent on subverting Hitler's apocalyptic plan to destroy the German industrial heartland before the Allies arrive; Franzi has become inextricably attached to Heinrich Himmler's entourage as astrologer and masseur; and Ziggy and Sebastian have each been employed in pursuits that threaten to compromise irrevocably their own safety and ideologies." "Now, with the Russian noose tightening around Berlin and the remnants of the Nazi government fleeing north to Flensburg, the Loerber brothers are unexpectedly reunited. As Himmler and Speer vie to become the next Fuhrer, deluded into believing they can strike a bargain with Eisenhower and escape their criminal fates, the Loerbers must employ all their talents - and whatever magic they possess - to rescue themselves and one another." Germania is an adventure tale - with subplots involving a hidden cache of Nazi gold, Hitler's miracle V-boats, and Speer's secret plan to live out his days hunting walrus in Greenland.

The Barnes & Noble Review

If the image of Albert Speer, a prominent Nazi, juggling rubber balls as a way to relieve stress in the waning days of the Third Reich doesn't make you sit up and say, "Mein Gott, vas is los?" then Brendan McNally's debut novel, Germania, might not be for you. On the other hand, if rollicking adventures of Jews masquerading as Nazis, secret wartime shipments of gold, SS officers dreaming of hunting walrus in Greenland, and the tense emotional dynamics of theatrical families intrigue you, then Germania will fit the bill quite nicely. At the heart of the novel are the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers, a popular German juggling act (in more ways than one, as it turns out), who split up just as Hitler is rising to power in the early 1930s. Manni, Franzi, Ziggy, and Sebastian all go their separate ways, some serving in the German military and some going underground with Resistance groups. But as the Allies tighten the noose around Berlin in 1945, Hitler commits suicide, and major players like Speer, Heinrich Himmler, and Admiral Karl Dönitz vie to fill the Nazi power vacuum, the Jewish brothers are reunited through a series of complicated plot twists. McNally mixes fact and fiction in a novel that is one part Michael Chabon, one part Ken Follett, and one part Marx Brothers. During their heyday, McNally writes, the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers' "time in the air was a flagrant violation of the laws of gravity and physics." The same could be said about McNally's novel as it juggles unlikely bedfellows -- Jews and Nazis -- but pulls it off with the "ease of the daring young man on the flying trapeze." --David Abrams