book cover of Mask My Agony
Added by 1 member
 

Mask My Agony

(1964)
A novel by

 
 
The lieutenant pointed to Erich. 'Take a good look at him, men! That is the face of war... that's what it looks like'. What happened to men like Erich - to soldiers so horribly disfigured that no human being could bear to look upon their ravaged faces, so grotesque that even the dogs turned away, howling in terror? What became of their relationship with their wives and girl friends, who had promised to wait until they came back from the war? How much they needed a woman's love! But they were afraid. Afraid of the disgust, revulsion in their eyes. Afraid of their pity. Afraid of their pretended love... "Mask My Agony" is the story of what happened to these men, at once a moving testimony to human courage and a terrible indictment of the full, intolerable horror of war.

Heinz G. Konsalik, pseudonym of Heinz Günther (May 28, 1921 - October 2, 1999) was a German novelist. During the Second World War he was a war correspondent that provided many experiences for his novels. Many of his books deal with war and showed the German human side of things as experienced by their soldiers and families at home, for instance Das geschenkte Gesicht (Mask My Agony) which deals with a German soldier's recovery after his sledge ran over a personnel mine and destroyed his face, and how this affected his relationship with his wife at home. It places no judgment on the German position in the war and simply deals with human beings in often desperate situations, doing what they were forced to do under German military law. Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad) made him famous and was adapted as a movie in 1958. Some 83 million copies sold of his 155 novels made him the most popular German novelist of the postwar era and many of his novels were translated and sold through book clubs.



Used availability for Heinz G Konsalik's Mask My Agony


About Fantastic Fiction       Information for Authors