C.F. Yetmen's Blog

In the film Phoenix, a concentration camp survivor returns to Berlin with the hope of rebuilding her life just as it was before the war. But of course, nothing is the same—not even her face—and she learns awful truths about her husband and people she thought were her friends. Through a clever (if slightly unbelievable) plot device, she is recreated, bit-by-bit, into her old self until she re-emerges into the light. But, she discovers of course, that nothing can be the same ever again.

So man...

I am delighted to report that more than 8,000 Kindle editions of The Roses Underneath were downloaded during the recent five-day giveaway. What a way to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the art delivery to the Wiesbaden Collecting Point! Thank you to everyone who shared and retweeted the giveaway to help spread the word. It is thrilling to know the book has so many new readers.

Congratulations and thanks to retweeter @jennym1979, who will receive a free copy of the audiobook. If you are a ne...

Custody card. Image from Ardelia Hall Collection at http://www.fold3.com/

The spark of the idea for The Roses Underneath came to me from the documentary, The Rape of Europa, which was my first introduction to the work of the Monuments Men. Because so many of the Monuments Men were architects and I work with architects every day, I had the germ of an idea about a theoretical novel I have always wanted to write about the end of World War II.

Reading about the events of August 20 1945 gave me an...

The trope that writing a novel is like giving birth has always irritated me. It’s not like giving birth at all, because when you give birth they give you nice drugs and to write you have to be pretty much sober. And birth, at least in my own experience, doesn’t take years (it only feels that way). But something strange does happen when you are writing a novel. You make up people, you put them in a time and place and you throw a bunch of stuff at them. Sometimes they go off on their own and yo...

Today, 70 years plus one day after D-Day, I turned to The New York Times Arts section and found three stories directly related to World War II and our ongoing processing of that horrendous time. Being a hopeless addict of historical ephemera was immediately drawn in to a review of “The Power of Words and Images in a World at War,” an exhibition just opened at the Grolier Club in Boston. On display are the iconic and memory tweaking images, posters, propaganda items as well as photos and other...

With the release of George Clooney’s Monuments Men movie and the recent find of thousands of pieces of priceless Nazi-stolen art in a Munich apartment, much attention is being paid to wartime looting of artworks. Of course, the spoils of war have always been a side benefit of battle— a perk of the business of destruction, if you will—but the Nazis took looting to an extreme and methodical level. Hitler, a failed and ungifted artist, thought he cared about art and viewed himself as the arbiter...

This idea, articulated by George Clooney in the upcoming film The Monuments Men (go see it February 7!) is at the core of The Roses Underneath’s plot. It’s what drove the work of The Monuments Men, not just during the World War II, but also afterward, when the work of restituting the millions of pieces of saved art began. When I first learned about the Monuments Men, it was through the documentary The Rape of Europa, which aired on PBS in early 2008. I happened on it while flipping through ch...

Happy 70th to the Monuments Men! It was on this day in 1943 that General Eisenhower sent a letter to all commanders in the field instructing them to spare any monuments from destruction “so far as war allows.” This was a direct outgrowth of the formation in August of 1943 of the Roberts Commission, which was given the task of protecting and salvaging the the artistic and historic monuments of Europe. Eighteen months after this directive, the Monuments Men would find an enormous stash of stole...

This wonderful article in the Smithsonian Magazine inspired a key scene in The Roses Underneath. I deliberately started the novel on August 15, 1945 so that I could include it in the plot. The Head of Nefertiti also plays a role in the story. I just love this description from the article (a fictional version of James Rorimer is being played by George Clooney in the movie, natch):

The painted bust of Queen Nefertiti still lives in Berlin today.

“Lindsay was there to greet the first convoy on the...

photo: Monuments Men Foundation

Monuments Man and architect Captain Walter I. Farmer, the director of the Wiesbaden Collecting Point, is the only real life character to appear in The Roses Underneath. When I began work on the novel some four years ago, little information existed online about the individual Monuments Men or their work. After trying for months to research the Wiesbaden Collecting Point, which is the setting for the book, I located a copy of his memoir, The Safekeepers: A Memoir...