The Music Makers: A novel about the death and re-birth of freedom - Hardcover

Like frogs in a simmering cauldron, We The People stare dumbly into our smartphones as autocrats slowly turn up the heat. The Music Makers tells the story of how the end result - dictatorship - smothered the lives of ordinary East Berliners and how they struggled be free of it.

The story unfolds as Greta, a civics teacher known for her eccentricities, spots a man playing an old-fashioned barrel organ on a busy street. She becomes enthralled as passers-by pause and gather. Soon they are filling the street and singing old German songs - a refreshing respite from their grueling lives in a grim, gray city brooded over by the notorious Stasi secret police.

Before long a cluster of amateur music makers is drawing dozens of picnickers, singers and dancers on Sunday afternoons. But soon Stasi and KGB agents are filtering smong them. And in time we see past lives exposed, their secrets bared, their souls tortured.

These and other undercurrents of dictatorship ignite events that lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The matic makers are but bit players in this cataclysmic drama, but their story shows how precious democracy is and how crucial it is for "ordinary people" to uphold it.