The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – That Summer in Berlin Paperback by Lecia Cornwall

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

That Summer in Berlin Paperback by Lecia Cornwall In the summer of 1936, while the Nazis make secret plans for World War II, a courageous and daring young woman struggles to expose the lies behind the dazzling spectacle of the Berlin Olympics. German power is rising again, threatening a war that will be even worse than the last one. The English aristocracy turns to an age-old institution to stave off war and strengthen political bonds—marriage. Debutantes flock to Germany, including Viviane Alden. On holiday with her sister during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Viviane’s true purpose is more clandestine. While many in England want to appease Hitler, others seek to prove Germany is rearming. But they need evidence, photographs to tell the tale, and Viviane is a genius with her trusty Leica. And who would suspect a pretty, young tourist taking holiday snaps of being a spy? Viviane expects to find hatred and injustice, but during the Olympics, with the world watching, Germany is on its best behavior, graciously welcoming tourists to a festival of peace and goodwill. But first impressions can be deceiving, and it’s up to Viviane and the journalist she’s paired with—a daring man with a guarded heart—to reveal the truth. But others have their own reasons for befriending Viviane, and her adventure takes a darker turn. Suddenly Viviane finds herself caught in a web of far more deadly games—and closer than she ever imagined to the brink of war.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. Thanks for tuning in.

We certainly appreciate it, guys. Be sure to go refer the show to all your friends, family, and relatives. We've got an amazing multi-book author. She's the author of about 20 books on the thing. She's probably going to have a lot more by the time we get done with this. Probably going to have two more books out by the time we get done with this show. So if I talk to her

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ChrisVossLeadershipInstitute.com. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com.

Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements. If you'd like to hire me, uh, training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneur ism, uh, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show.

And be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipInstitute.com. Now back to the show. She's out with her latest book. It'll be October 11, 2022. How did we get to the end of the year so fast? That's the only way I tell time is by having authors on the show to give us release dates. That's how I know where I'm at. She's the author of the newest book. You want to pre-order it where you can get wherever fine books are sold. That Summer in Berlin by Alicia Cornwall. She's on the show with us today talking about her books. And she's originally from Ontario. She now calls the foothills of Canada's Rocky Mountains home. She's the author of up to 20 novels. We'll get an exact count

here in a bit. The Woman at the Front was her first historical fiction title. It's being followed by That Summer in Berlin, and she writes full-time. She loves gardening and knitting. She adop gardening and knitting.

She adopts stray creatures. You have to catch, you know, be careful what you're adopting there. I don't know. Yeah. If you stick with cats, I think you're okay. But, you know, don't do like wombats or something. I don't know why you do wombats, but it sounded funny at the time. Rabbits are the most exotic. There you go.

Yeah. You know, just don't, I mean i mean cats bite but just stay away from the even spoilt like don't adapt rattlesnakes or something i learned that don't ask uh she created words from cardboard paint and glue she's clearly an artist and uh when she's on her work at her desk working on her next book she's walking her dog she loves dogs too so that makes her a good person. Welcome to the show, Alicia. How are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me, Chris. There you go. You can tell I'm a dog person. Give us your.com so we can find you on the internet so we can get to know you better. I'm at aliciacornwell.com. Easy to find. And you can find the links there to Facebook and Instagram and all the other social media.

And how many books exactly did you have or do you have an exact count? I keep losing track. I think it's about 19. I wrote historical fiction for a long time before I started writing historical romance, before I started writing historical fiction a few years ago. So yes, the romances are far more numerous at this point. So do you hop back and forth? Do you write romance books, do one romance book and do historical fiction? Or are you kind of turned and doing more of the historical fiction now?

I am firmly in historical fiction now, I think. I still love to read romance on occasion, and I think of Watts now and then, but no, I'm firmly in historical fiction. I find it a much more open genre with far less conventions that you have to follow. So yes, I like the freedom. Yeah, plus with historical fiction,

she can get paid to go traveling to go study the place you're writing about. Is that what you do? Other authors tell me that's what they're up to. I'd love to, but all those cats and dogs and bunnies keep me at home a lot of the time. Bunnies too, huh? One bunny. One bunny. One bunny. My daughter brought him home during the pandemic, and he's quite a guy.

There you go. Just make sure the cats and dogs don't get a hold of him. That's the main thing there. Oh, he's in charge. Oh, really? He's the boss. I would like to see videos of that. Great TikTok videos of Bunny ruling the house there.

So you've written a lot of different books. And you've written about romance and now historical fiction. What motivated you to want to write this book? Well, I started researching different things about the 1930s, which is a decade I find really fascinating. And, I mean, research takes three phases. First of all, you have the magpie phase, where you're reading everything you can get your hands on, trying to find an idea for a story.

And then you have the wormhole phase. You say, okay, well, that might make a good story. Let's start researching that and you get you're looking for uh a specific idea or a specific piece of information and you find like other ways to go and then finally you get to the aha moment which is when you got the idea and you know it's going to make a good book. So I think the the aha moment for this one was finding out that in the 1930s the British were sending their debutantes, like 18-year-old girls, over to Germany

with the prospect of hopefully intermarrying and preventing a war that way. Really? Yeah. The upper classes had the idea that if they intermarried that there couldn't possibly be another war. But I mean, the aristocrats in both countries sort of thought, okay, well, we're going to let Hitler do his thing, get the people worked up. We're going to let him build the country up and fix the economy and gives them pride again.

And then when he gets too big for his boots, we're just going to knock him down. Well, of course, that didn't work. In the meantime, we'll sell him all the stuff that he can use, you know, all the hardware and engines and planes and tanks so that he can have a war with us. It was quite extraordinary when you listen to Churchill, you know. Absolutely. What the hell are we doing here? We're, you know, we're, I mean, we're making, we're making money so that they can bomb the

hell out of us. Um, yeah, it's quite extraordinary what took place in that war. It's like if we started selling, it's like right now, if we started selling, uh, a military parts to Russia, eventually they attack us and we're like, what? I didn't see that coming. Why did you do that? Why? Why? And so there you go. Now, do your

books follow a series? Is there a character that goes through the series or each kind of a standalone? No, the historicals are standalones at this point. There are additional sort of ideas for follow-ons with other characters. I mean, sometimes you fall in love with a secondary character, and you just want to give them their own book. And that's sort of like they're inside your head telling you, okay, write my story. Yeah, writers have a lot of voices in their heads explain the viral book wait i hear it's not schizophrenia if there's more than eight if it's a personality if you have eight personalities that are the voices in your head it's just if you think that another personality

outside yourself is talking to yourself, then that's schizophrenia. At least that's my excuse. I keep telling my psychiatrist. I just keep telling them and telling people it's ADHD. Yeah, ADHD. That's the other excuse I think I use. I have ADHD and so do the other 10 people in my head, especially the one who keeps saying I'll kill, kill, kill all the time. The judge says I have to ignore now as long as I'm wearing the ankle bracelet.

So give us an outline, an overview of this book in a little bit more depth. I know with novels, we can't really give away the opportunity to take a trip to Germany on holiday during the summer of 1936 when the Olympics are on. And she's going to be the guest of some upper class, high ranking German family. So she's asked to kind of use her camera. She's a camera buff, so to use her camera to sort of take a look behind the scenes of what the Nazis might be really hiding, like preparations for war and

weapons filled up and things like that. And she thinks that they think that, okay, she's just a young tourist with a camera. She's going to be fine. And if she gets caught, she'll just talk her way out of it. It's like, what,

this old thing? You know, kind of an idea. And she's, she's sort of asked to do this by a British reporter who can't really go to the places that she can because they kept the press very controlled, of course. So she's working with him to try and,

and find what's necessary. And she has to be very careful because there are people watching her. And of course, there's always a chance she will get caught or will get caught up in something she can't handle. And yes,

you have to read the book and find out what exactly happens when that occurs. So is she officially a spy or kind of a spy? Because she's working for... I think she starts out as a very reluctant tourist, and she's sort of drawn into helping somebody and then sort of proving her skills as a photographer. And then, yes, she is technically a spy.

Ah. Yes. And so what sort of study did you do to come up with this and background sort of things? Delve us into some of the fun that was. Well, I read a lot about the Olympics and a lot about the rise of Hitler, which was heavy reading.

And a lot about female photographers and a lot about the four correspondents that worked in Berlin during the 30s, which was very fascinating. So that's the wormhole thing i mean you start researching one thing you think oh but there's that and i can add that to the story um and then there's kind of a theme that runs through it of uh of king arthur so um sort of the once a future king and she sort of thinks that her father has brought her up to believe that you know the lake where she learned to swim was the real um pool where Excalibur came from

she has this sort of um feeling in the in her heart that you know this is this is part of my legacy this is sort of once a future king the saving the country um so that's a sort of a theme and a symbol that runs through the book oh wow wow that's pretty interesting the uh uh you know it it was a really interesting time in history in that era um and i imagine there's kind of a romantic feel to that era because you know it's still pre-war and there's a i mean there's a certain beauty to europe and and germany and berlin um and uh you know there's there's you know everything hasn't been bombed to hell again i imagine everything yes rebuilt at that point um and uh and pretty good um that was really interesting to me that they would send young women over

to marry up and I suppose keep a war from happening. They're like, hey, we don't want a war in Europe. Send them wives. That'll fix it. Well, these women came back and when they were interviewed years later, it was like, oh, I had the most marvelous time and

we didn't see anything. We just loved the way the men looked in the uniforms. like, oh, I had the most marvelous time. And we didn't see anything. We just loved the way the men looked in the uniforms. Going to parties and listening to the music. We weren't paying any attention to that little man with the mustache. So it was sort of completely denied that there was anything political, any political involvement or support for Hitler there. So it didn't help at all that they did this, huh? No.

I'm not sure how many of them married into the family. I mean, there were the Mitford sisters, which were a family of girls, and one of them, Nancy Mitford, was a writer, and Unity Mitford was a Hitler devotee. She actually went over and stocked a cafe until she got a chance to actually meet him. And she became one of his favorites. And her sister was the mistress of the British equivalent to Hitler, the fascist union leader, Oswald Mosley. And she eventually married him. So, yeah, there were a couple of very famous, I guess, British Nazis.

But, yes, Hitler had a real thing for young English girls. And I think that was because he saw the connection with England. He admired England, and he wanted that connection. So he encouraged it. It's interesting how what's the correct word? The narcissism of some of these fascist leaders we see all the time and how much they want to they really long to be

someone else or someone bigger. And part of the book is set during the 1936 Berlin Olympics as well? Yes. That's sort of the book is set during the 1936 Berlin Olympics as well? Yes. Yeah. That's sort of the backdrop of the book.

And that was a very interesting Olympics. When they were awarded the Olympics in 1931 and Hitler came to power and said, well, we're not doing that. That's a silly thing. And people like Joseph Goebbels suggestedels suggested that no it has propaganda value we can make our we could make our debut on the international stage and show them how great we are and how superior and how powerful and uh and hitler still wasn't convinced and they took him to tour a uh an arena and this arena had been built for a night Games that was supposed to take place in Berlin in 1916 of course it was cancelled, it was the First World War

and they said, well, we can't really expand it very much, and he said what? I want it all torn down and rebuilt, I want a stadium for 100,000 people, it's got better than anything that's ever been done before in the modern Olympics, and that's sort of when he was convinced, it wasn't

necessarily entirely the propaganda value value it was also the chance to show off his uh i don't know good taste architectural skills you know how he he loved he loved building things or planning to build things that were you know large and yeah that happens in the area um you know and this this uh historically this happened a lot women were used as spies during world war ii um we i know we had uh one uh famous author on she wrote a book about how women were used to smuggle stuff in and out and be spies and uh saboteurs uh especially during this was, she wrote a book about women who were doing this during, uh, when the Germans put the Jews in Jewish, um, Jewish slums, they would force them all to live in a very small, horrible place. And, uh, they,

you know, they had to have checkpoints where where the um you know you couldn't leave or come and go but women would have the freedom to you know leave and go get food or goods or something and they were they were kind of deemed like well you know they'll never do anything bad and you know they're very good looking so they would use their sexual charm to to uh engage the sometimes sometimes they would bring like you know guns back into the thing and because they were so cute they would you know the german soldiers would hey do you want to help carry that right back into the thing or out of the thing you know and and uh you know they would they would be uh used in that way and uh so uh yeah they would they would get away with a lot of stuff

saboteurs spies sometimes they would kill i think it wasn't stuff, saboteurs, spies. Sometimes they would kill. I think, wasn't there a famous story that was based, you know, the movie Inglourious Basterds. I think they stole one of the stories where a woman, if I recall rightly, and maybe this was the author that we had come in, she ended up killing or bombing and, you know, some of them were really responsible for some stuff that they did. Well, I love the story of Audrey Hepburn, that tiny, delicate, absolute gorgeous little actress.

Well, during the war, I believe she was Dutch, and she lived in the Netherlands, and she would lure Nazis in, and they'd kill them. Ah! To mirror a little creature. And I think that's what makes women good spies is that it's unexpected in a lot of cases um that uh people people expect this of a man but not necessarily of a woman and you think of matahari i mean everybody's like oh yes that's wonderful and then the pillow talk gets repeated um and i mean there are female photographers who did this too i mean there was one who was uh she was a devoted communist before the war, and she married a British guy and moved to England, where she actually recruited disaffected Englishmen to work for Stalin. she recruited were the Cambridge Five. So Kim Philby and his friends,

who became some of the most notorious spies in English history. So I thought that was interesting. Awesome sauce. So this sounds like a lot of fun, a fun romp. And is it a beach read or is it something you sit down and read through? I hope it's something that people want to want to keep on reading a page turner but um is it a beach read um it's a fairly serious subject i'm not sure if i'm a beach read kind of person i mean i love humor in books but uh uh yeah i try to sort

of um drive people on with things that are are surprising that they're not expecting to read. There you go. Well, anything more we want to tease out on the book before we go? I don't know. I love the details of the story. If people can go and research

things like one of the most fascinating parts of the story was the movie that hitler had made uh hired a woman as just felt as this director and she had shot the uh the famous nuremberg rally documentary and if you have ever seen any pictures of the nazis on parade that's probably from that movie and so she took a year before the games to actually create the technology, new film, new lenses, new methods of taking pictures underwater photography.

And she shot over a million feet of film before that, well, during the games. And it took her two years to edit it. And it won amazing reviews all over Europe. And she came to the U.S. to promote it. And unfortunately, her ship landed a few days after Kristallnacht had happened, which was a riot where Jewish people were targeted across the country. Their houses were broken. Synagogues were burned down. Storefronts were sort of damaged. That's why it's called Kristallnacht, broken glass. And so no one would ever speak to her in the US. So she never became famous there but for a woman to be so innovative in the techniques that she is that they're still used in sports photography today and to be so powerful as to get the kind of freedom

to make a film like that in germany and and within the very misogynistic world of film itself she's a very interesting character and yet she was manipulative and a liar and a lot of things, as well as a genius. So that was one of the most fascinating characters I read about during this. Oh, wow. You wouldn't think that they would have said, hey, she's got a lot of film that we could use to know what's going on in Germany and maybe, you know, good spy sort of data. She was German, and she was very devoted to Hitler, and Hitler was very devoted to her, although she denied it later. So I don't think there was any way any of that was getting out of Germany. Or out of her very, I don't know, grasping hands.

I don't know. I would at least tap that film so you could, you know, hey, yeah, we want to see your film. It is a great film. It's interesting. It's like good data. I mean, now we have satellites that do all that, but back then, whatever. But, you know, this is clearly why I don't run the government's or the Pentagon.

So this has been one thing. More fun to be an author than a politician, I think. We could just make it up. That's true. Plus, when you work for the government, you've got to follow rules. And I'm really bad at rules. It's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on, Alicia.

We really appreciate it. Well, thanks. It was lovely to meet you, Chris, and to chat with you. Thank you. And we'll look forward to your next book. Are you working on that yet? I'm in the magpie phase. So we're gathering ideas.

Okay. The magpie phase. I like that. I might use that. You're looking for ideas. So is that what magpies do? They kind of go and they look for anything shiny and steal it. That's isn't that what we do?

That's pretty much true. For the best ideas. It's for the tiny. They twist it. Yeah. I think Tom Peters called it creative swiping. Yes. Where corporations copy each other's stuff and then they try and make it better.

So they put their own spin on it. So there you go. GiveUsYour.com so people can find you on the interwebs. You can find me at AliciaCornwall.com, which is very easy. And all the links to everything you need, including getting in touch with me if you'd like to, is there. Thanks. And thanks for tuning in to my audience. Be sure to go to all of our groups on Facebook,

LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tik TOK, all those crazy places. The kids are playing. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.