Defeated, humiliated, and in chaos, Germany after World War I was imperiled by leftist revolution and right-wing violence. Jack Mayer recounts the origins of the Third Reich through the story of Ernst Werner Techow, a member of the para-military Free Corps and the murderous Organization C, who was recruited into a clandestine assassination network trying to bring down the fledgling Weimar democracy.
Techow participated in the 1922 murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the highest-ranking Jew in the Weimar Republic. But an offer of forgiveness while on trial for his life set him on a complex journey of redemption.
About the presenter
Jack Mayer is a Vermont writer and retired pediatrician. His first practice was on the Canadian border where he began writing poems about his practice and hiking Vermont’s Long Trail. He was a cancer researcher at Columbia University from 1987 – 1991. He returned to Vermont as a primary care pediatrician and established Rainbow Pediatrics in Middlebury in 1991. Dr. Mayer retired in 2021. He was an Instructor in Pediatrics (UVM) and pre-med advisor (Middlebury College).
Dr. Mayer participated in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2003, 2005 (fiction) and 2008 (poetry). He has written four books, Life In A Jar: The Irena Sendler Project and Before The Court Of Heaven, a poetry collection Poems From The Wilderness ( Proverse 2019, Winner of the Proverse Prize) and his second collection of poems, Entanglements: Physics, Love, And Wilderness Dreams (Proverse 2022) which reflects his interest in the physics and metaphysics of cosmology and the primacy of relationships.
Visit his website: https://www.jackmayer.net
