Myself, I was not the strongest and sportiest of children and that probably leaked into Sebastian’ s character as well. Expectations of what a man is supposed to be like and so on, all that feeds into his own journey of finding self-worth and confidence, something most of my characters in Sebastian have to struggle with, not just Sebastian. I did not mean to picture him as a victim; those days, as much as today, many genuinely disadvantaged people try extra hard to compensate instead of looking after themselves properly. I wanted to show how strong and determined these people can be, that is why in his family almost everyone has an ailment of sorts, leaving him the strongest of the weak bunch.
It has often been said that Vienna before the war was a golden era, for Jews and for Austrians. Especially during my research for THE LUCK OF THE WEISSENSTEINERS I came across many such statements and I wanted to clarify that myself, so I read a lot about it.
The other reason was that the themes in the first book are often seen as a consequence of the times during which Sebastian is set. I realised how much I still had to learn about the times and delved into research. Since I had mentioned the consequences of the Habsburg Monarchy and the end of World War I already in THE LUCK OF THE WEISSENSTEINERS I did not need to repeat myself and go into the political aftermath but could stay focused on how society and life in general was changing in Vienna, which enabled me to make Sebastian the second instalment.
Knowing what would become of Austria a mere 20 years later made me feel for my characters, who at that stage did not know anything about their future or the future of their newly formed country.
In THE LUCK OF THE WEISSENSTEINERS I am doing a close up of one particularly affected country, Czechoslovakia and splitting from it, Slovakia. Even in that small new nation there are various ethnic groups, hinting at the difficulty to choose and defining a valid border with the many historic changes that have affected Central Europe over the decades and centuries even. The National Idea, taken to the extreme by Hitler, can destroy everything and everyone to the point that we see how ridiculous and meaningless such concepts can become in the face of human suffering.
In SEBASTIAN I am going back a step to a time when forcefully Nations were glued together with politics and force, despite their natural force to drift apart. The fall of Habsburg to me is a symbol for the infeasibility of forcing nations against their will and that the movement was born from a legitimate human desire for self-rule. In both books the political changes affect the people and in both books the characters overcome the barriers in their own ways and form their own leagues and bonds.
I don’ t think I am Nationalist of any kind but I am probably a little sensitised to the issue.