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 .