A GOSSIP COLUMNIST'S PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH IN NAZI GERMANY. Legendary author-filmmaker MARTYN BURKE 's New Novel (1/27/26) Special Q&A

 Burke manages, with impressive literary artistry, to shed some light on a historical conundrum:  How did such unabashed  savagery spring from such a famously refined national culture?” –Kirkus Reviews

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “Gossip long ago became the only truth we get. After the Nazis took over, I had to write my newspaper column in a kind of code.” –THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST. 

 MARTYN BURKE’S THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST EXAMINES WHAT HAPPENED IN 1933, WHEN CENSORSHIP RAISED GOSSIP TO OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION. 

Based on historical fact, THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST, is set in Berlin–from the depraved and hedonistic days of Weimar Germany to the end of WW2. The Nazi infatuation with power had degenerated to a sexual circus in the 20’s and 30’s. Bella and Karin, two sisters about ten years apart in age must navigate their world, after their mother’s death and their banker father’s indoctrination into the Nazis party. 

Bella, a reporter on the paper, soon becomes entrenched in one of the few areas of news the Nazis tolerated. After takeovers films, radios and newspapers, news was what they said it was. But how to obliterate events? They needed to be seen and mentioned, followed. 

And in the sexual circus that was Berlin, Bella’s sister, Karin, a young beautiful actress, was in demand and somehow oblivious to her risk. Bella sought to protect her from the raging degeneracy. The story of her survival and sanity as her country falls apart and her elemental sister’s beauty and love of nature is a wild tumultuous journey. 

From the clubs and cabarets to the film studio amid the Allied bombing and then tanks, all the while Bella moving from print and the paper, hot on her trail, to hiding and communicating gossip through stealthy word-of-mouth messengers—this is an adventure of truth disguised as gossip in a world that yet knew the difference. 

DARKSPUR PRESS Founded in 2024 by a group of partners headed by Monica Leal Cueva, Darkspur Press looks for works from the past that can engage today’s readers as well as contemporary new fiction, influenced by everything from the crisis of war to the struggles of humans caught in the crosshairs of their times. www.thegossipcolumnist.com.

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 Q.  You are a Peabody award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and author of multiple novels. Is this work related? 

A.   I grew up loving writing, as a boy in Canada. I wrote diaries and my careers developed around film. One day, I found a camera club in Toronto and discovered many of its middle-aged members were doing what they loved –cameras, for about two hours a week while working at jobs they didn’t like for forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. I decided that would not be me. I would do what I loved all the time.  I had always loved storytelling, and film was kind of an extension of my writing. As well as a fabulous research tool for my novels.

 Q. How did you become a war journalist? 

 A. I started at Canadian Broadcasting in Toronto and in my early 20’s was lucky enough to have a couple of very successful documentaries. It was a glorious time to be there because I was soon given almost free rein to do whatever interested me –including wars and revolutions. In South America, in Peru, there was an overthrow of the government. In Northern Ireland there was combat between Protestants and Catholics. In Africa I was one of the very few people to get to possibly the most murderous dictators of them all -Idi Amin. I spent several hair-raising days with him; went to his father’s funeral; and even dared him to take me on a personal tour of the Ugandan capital, Kampala. Later I ended up in Afghanistan, sleeping in caves with fierce Mujahideen, and going out on combat missions when the Russians were fighting there. 

Q What inspired the Peabody-award winning and Academy Award shortlisted documentary Under Fire: Journalists In Combat? 

A.     I had seen wars and conflict situations working beside some fascinating journalists and photographers -male and female. These people were a different breed, brave and often addicted to the adrenaline rush of war. In Toronto, I met a neuropsychiatrist, who treated combat journalists from CNN, New York Times, Times of London when one of their journalists had emotional meltdown. He and I collaborated on a film about the psychological cost of covering war. And sometimes that cost is horrendous. 

Q. What inspired your novel, The Gossip Columnist? 

 A. Bella takes place in Berlin, from the depraved and hedonistic days of Weimar Germany to the end of WW2. In his book 1933, Phillip Metcalfe wrote, “Censorship had raised gossip to the level of official communication.” In my novel, Bella says, “Gossip long ago became the only truth we get. After the Nazis took over, I had to write my newspaper column in a kind of code.” The novel is based on historical fact. I wanted to explore that situation. 

    Q. What is there from your own experience that you brought into the story of The Gossip Columnist?

A.  In totalitarian societies I’ve seen the terror and the crushing of moral guidelines, and always there is the question you ask yourself: “How did it get to this?” I spent a lot of time researching the step-by-step descent of one of history’s most cultured societies into the depravity of the Nazis –and I wanted to see it through the eyes of my most prominent character, Bella, as she has to flee from her job as the gossip columnist at Berlin’s biggest newspaper I’ve also seen in action, the old adage “Information Is Power”.  One of the first documentaries I made was called “Politics In Filmmaking” It was a look at how information is handled –everything from Hemingway narrating a film about the Spanish Civil War to spending time with members of the Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted. 

Q. Does The Gossip Columnist relate to contemporary politics? 

A. It may, but I am not in the prophecy business. I did a lot of research including walking through the homes of one of,the most prominent Nazis. The events in the novel are absolutely real, but the story centers on two fictional sisters. Bella worked for a newspaper covering social events; “who’s who” of-royalty, show business, the rich and powerful. Increasingly, that meant prominent Nazis. Until Bella had to flee for her life, the job allowed her to keep tabs on her willful and vain younger sister Karin. 

Q. How does Bella’s job change under Nazi control? 

A. When the Jewish owners of her Berlin newspaper have to flee and the paper becomes a Nazi mouthpiece, her job becomes perilous. As her editor said, “When gossip becomes history, people get killed.” Later, she is instructed to “leave out the history.” 

Q. Many people, wonder how a civilization, so ancient and cultured, became the source of unprecedented cruelty and barbarism– Auschwitz and Dachau. How did that happen? 

A. Impossible to answer, but I remember the amazing sensation of being in Germany and walking among Nazi architecture. Buildings and statues were huge, grandiose, a lot of gold.  An overwhelming infatuation with power. (As Bella discovers, infatuation is powerful.) How can evil, barbarism be so wrong? I’ve always thought that civilization is a thin veneer over what lies below. It is a precious treasure; it must be guarded. 

 Q. What are some of the challenges Bella faces in this novel? 

A. On a personal level, mere weeks after Bella’s morally courageous mother dies, her father comes home wearing a swastika armband and proudly announcing that his bank and the Nazi party are joining together. Professionally Bella’s job, becomes increasingly important, because it gave her entrée not just to official events, but also to information about the sexual circus that was Berlin in the 1920s and early 30s. Her younger sister Karin took jobs in clubs and cabarets, and Bella had to be ready to rescue her, from the degenerates around her. Extraordinarily beautiful and strangely self-possessed, Karin infuriated Bella by believing there would be no price to pay for her affairs with leading Nazis. 

 Q. Is Bella a “reliable narrator” in how she interprets events? 

A. So much so, that she becomes a threat to the regime, and because she accurately reports what she sees Bella has to flee into hiding. While in the hideout, she learns from her actress-sister Karin many of the secret scandals –many of them sexual, of the Nazi hierarchy. So she devises a scheme to put a different kind of gossip out into Berlin. It is Word-Of-Mouth gossip that quickly spreads through the city. It infuriates the Nazis –and incredibly, it actually happened 

Q. In the U.S., there is a collective “forgetting” of events that can’t be absorbed. It’s often blamed on the media’s speed of events. The fate of innocents deported without cause, or the assassination of an important Democratic Congresswoman, fade in importance of the next week. Is this similar to Nazis times, did people forget what they could not emotionally absorb? 

A. The Nazis had control over every form of media that then existed: films; radio and newspapers. News was whatever they said it was. And if they wanted an inconvenient event to be forgotten they simply obliterated its existence by having it never mentioned, filmed or written about 

 Q.  THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST is a wild, darkly funny book. It is also controversial, because it’s lens of chaotic “history,” does seem to refer to our present. Aldous Huxley said, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets are human.” So Bella, as a journalist is in essence a truth-teller?

 A. I hope it is read for among other reasons, the story of Bella’s survival and sanity, as her country falls apart, and her elemental sister’s erratic instincts for beauty and nature. 

 Q. Why have you and others founded Darkspur Press at this time? 

 A. There was nothing like it. I have published six novels with traditional houses and realized we need a new ecosystem. We wanted not only to bring back books with great reviews that had been published by established publishing houses, but also to release books that were relevant today. Just as there are new sources for news, such as Substack, we also need new publishing models. BELLA: The Gossip Columnist is our first new book and there is little compromise in this material.

Source: https://notanotherbookreview.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-gossip-columnists-pursuit-of-truth-in.html