Paul Marzell was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently resides in western Pennsylvania with his wife, Janet, and Golden Retriever, Nala. He is a United States Air Force veteran and served in West Germany in the early sixties. He earned BSBA and MBA degrees in operations management and financial analysis from Temple University and Golden Gate University. His work experience includes thirty years in management and non-management postions in the airline industry. Heimat is his first novel.
HEIMAT: A captivating historical epic of post-World War One Germany through World War Two, its aftermath, and the Cold War.
In 1929, Matthias and his friend, Josef, left their Heimat, Neisse, Germany, on a journey to the United States, seeking a brighter future and leaving behind the humiliation of Germany’s World War One defeat and the economically crushing terms of the Versailles Treaty. On their way to the TS Bremen’s maiden voyage to America, they save the life of an American diplomat, Peter, from the tracks in Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof. They are joined in the heroic act by two unlikely travelers from their Heimat: Edo, a tailor, is escaping the approaching threat of government-sanctioned anti-Semitism and preparing for his family’s emigration to follow, and Feliks, an ethnic Polish teenager, because his family’s farm could not support him and his brothers. The heroic act bonds the emigrants and the diplomat, who benevolently manipulates the emigrants throughout their lives, in a friendship that sustains them through broken promises, misconceptions of the American dream, the Great Depression, Prohibition, World War Two, and the diaspora of eastern Europe in its aftermath. The war sent them on separate paths: to a shipyard building vessels to carry destruction to their Heimat, the US Army fighting in the Pacific and later with the Polish resistance, Germany’s Wehrmacht invading France and Russia, and the Nuremberg trials to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. Their dreams of returning to Neisse, their Heimat, as successful Americans were shattered as the war shifted the border of Poland west to include Neisse in its territory.
Paul F. Marzell 