On Writing, The Story That Must Not Be Told Ina Andreae, on Paper, Exhibition Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, May/June1974

My dear friend, Sharon Simone, has lost most of her eyesight, and she is no longer able to read books or long texts online. Her husband, Pat Simone, is doing the kindness of reading my book, The Story That Must Not Be Told to her and they have reached page 40 or thereabout. As in all good marriages, Sharon and Pat have deep affinities with each other and also they are quite different. When Sharon asked Pat as they sat looking onto the waters of the Binney Park Brook having just finished reading a section, “Well, what do you think?” she had no idea if the book meant anything to him, if he had been affected the way she had been.

Pat said, “Well, the first thing that comes to me is the relationship between that time, Hitler’s time, 1933 and this time since Trump was elected.” He continued, that he, himself, had begun to recognize it just after the Inauguration, and it mattered to him to see it described in the way it was in the book.

I am stunned by these words. How did it happen that I wrote a book with this theme? Ultimately, these connections became a focus, a focus I could not avoid, but not in the beginning. The book began as the search for the cause of a suicide. Ina Andreae’s brother, Wolfgang, had come to Los Angeles to see what he could learn of his sister’s death fifty years earlier. As the circumstances of Ina’s life became clear, so did the history that had affected her. Even though it is a novella, a fiction, it is based on real events, best as they can be known and conjectured.

Ina’s great grandfather had founded a ship building company, Blohm & Voss, which built warships for Hitler. They also had aligned with Messerschmidt to build warplanes. Her grandfather on one side and another grandfather who married into the family, marrying Ina Blohm, had run the company during the war. Ina had not been born yet, not until 1949, but to understand her death, she led me, is leading us, to consider what she knew about those times and the family’s participation in them.

Because members of her family had been involved, I traced the development of events in Germany beginning in 1933 and soon perceived that they were repeating themselves here. Another grandfather, her mother’s father, had been the publisher of a newspaper which had been shut down briefly. Afterwards, it was taken over by the Nazis so that it presented the news from the regime’s perspective.

Trump sued CBS, ABC and the Wall Street Journal over content and barred the Associated Press from White House press conferences because the Press would not rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. These are just several examples of many similar actions to control the press and the nation.

Within a year or so, the book came to its conclusion, the revelations of what had occurred, the process of discovery, the reason for Ina’s suicide were revealed beyond doubt. But it was impossible to stop writing because the mirror images were multiplying. Also, it was unclear whether these connections were circumstantial or whether the past had become a playbook for the U. S. President. Concerned about our future, I began to write an Afterword that tracked ongoing developments as they happened.

Then we began copy editing with my publisher, Hand to Hand, in the U. S. and Wolfgang Andreae’s publishing firm, Lexxion Verlag, in Germany. But while the book was finished and Ina’s story had been told, I felt obliged to add one emerging, startling similarity after another. Accordingly, with each addition, the book had to be re-edited and adjusted accordingly. None of this had been in my mind, and certainly not in Wolfgang’s mind, in the beginning. The writing of the book was the means of revelation for both of us. So what was finished in May was continued, tensely, through July.

Finally, Wolfgang was overwhelmed by the need to read and reread as the text of this rather small book, shifted and shifted, and he demanded, “Stop.”

I answered, “We can’t. The parallels are too extreme.”

He said, “We must, or we will engage in this process until January 20, 2029, when the next President is (hopefully) inaugurated.”

I answered, “Then we must go to press immediately!” And so we did. The book is out in the U. S. and will be out in Berlin soon.

The range of the book’s concerns is fixed but new parallels present themselves and demand to be recognized whether or not it might become dangerous to do so. Noting the increasing correspondence between Hitler’s actions and Trump’s, I am reflecting on the mystery of the book appearing exactly at this time.

Wolfgang first wrote to me on October 10, 2023. If he had come to the U.S. when he was expected the following month, if he had not had a heart attack which delayed him, none of this would have been included. But he came in March 2024, and even then I had no interest in writing the book, but in November Trump was elected and somehow the book was inevitable.

It seems that invisible forces, which we have named or recognized as the Ghost of Ina Andreae, having foresight, were determined to tell this story, and to tell it exactly at this time in history, at this moment in Trump’s second term when the correlations are startling between 1993 and the rise of Nazism and 2025 and the rise of Trumpism.

Thinking about Nazi Germany, and World War II, one thinks about the Holocaust and the concentration camps which were the means. In 1944, Blohm & Voss had had a Slave Labor Camp on the premises. In the last days, ICE has taken over Fort Bliss in Texas, the former Japanese internment camp, for its largest detention camp, and images have been circulating of a potential concentration camp in Gaza city. activities which have been unimaginable since the end of WW II, but here we are.

Nazi Germany depended upon a police state. Trump is threatening to militarize and control local police in cities he fears in order to police the entire country. Still, the timing of The Story and its publication in August 2025 allowed it to appear just at this right moment. But if what we think is happening, if what we chronicle as happening, is happening, then the ability to resist may become increasingly limited.

Telling this story is a form of resistance. This is also a way to honor the dead. It offers Ina, who conceived The Story and her brother, Wolfgang, who called it forth in an extraordinary act of personal courage and conscience, a form for making amends for the collaboration of their grandparents. If Wolfgang had not insisted again and again that I write Ina’s story, if he had not heeded the Ghost of his sister, this book would never have been conceived or written.

It is also possible that on my own, I might have been too cautious in my analysis of how exactly Trump’s actions resemble Hitler’s and not pursued it so doggedly. However, I was aware beyond any doubt that this story was being revealed through spiritual agency and allowed myself to be guided. Without the mystery, there would be no book. Perhaps the spirits will guide many of us. Spirit called Wolfgang and me to collaborate on this work for a reason though we do not understand it fully. Perhaps Ina is saying, “My family did nothing then to stop the escalation of terror, but they, and we can do something now.” Perhaps it is simply contained in the words that Pat said to Sharon as they finished their discussion, “This book could matter. This could make a difference.”

Blohm & Voss was part of KZ Neuengamme. This is the Memorial KZ Neuengamme: Sculpture “LeDeporté” from Françoise Salmon, 1965