THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST By Martyn Burke. HOW Did one of history's most cultured societies descend into the depravity of the Nazis?

“Censorship had raised gossip to the level of official communication.”1933: The Year the Nazis Seized Power" by Philip Metcafe.0\-- The Gossip Columnist, Sunday, April 22, 1945

   It's been a strange experience, reading this book at this time in the United States. It's arrived as democracy is under daily assault in Congress and the streets of our cities. Processes similar to those used by the Nazis have been echoed in our news headlines, attacks on our institutions, including press repression. I asked Martyn Burke, author of the new novel, THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST (1/27/26 DarkSpur Press), the following question:

     Q. What is there from your own experience that you brought into the story of The Gossip Columnist?

A. "In totalitarian societies I’ve seen the terror and the crushing of moral guidelines, and always there is the question you ask yourself: “How did it get to this?” I spent a lot of time researching the step-by-step descent of one of history’s most cultured societies into the depravity of the Nazis --and I wanted to see it through the eyes of my most prominent character, Bella, as she has to flee from her job as the gossip columnist at Berlin’s biggest newspaper I’ve also seen in action, the old adage “Information Is Power”.  One of the first documentaries I made was called “Politics In Filmmaking” It was a look at how information is handled --everything from Hemingway narrating a film about the Spanish Civil War to spending time with members of the Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted."

        Recently, journalists have been dismissed for their political views, as conservative owners have taken over news organization. Similarly, in Bella's Germany, where even the owners were dismissed, she is the rare journalist, who's kept her job at a major newspaper. This fictional character, based on a real journalist, is the narrator of The Gossip Columnist.  She is a clear-eyed resporter in a time when the Nazis Regime controlled every form of media-- films, radio and newspapers--so news was whatever they said it was. 

       If they wanted an inconvenient event to be forgotten they simply obliterated its existence by having it never mentioned, filmed or written about. Bella was essential, because her reportage on their appearances and importance at social events was thought to raise the public image of the Hitler regime.  She was also privy to informationa bout the sexual circus that was Berlin in the 1920s and early 30s.  This was crucial. since her  younger sister, Karin, unusually beautiful and oddly oblivious to danger, worked in clubs and cabarets.  Not infrequently, Bella would get a tip and need to act quickly to rescue Karin from harm. 

 In this complex novel of action, risk and courage, you learn about the family's descent into political madness.  The day her father, who worked in a bank, came home wearing a Nazis armband excited by the new power hierarchy in business, was the day Bella left home. As the economy tanks the security of the business and her family, food is scarce.  All that can be sold is hawked, including for some the virtue of their children. All sacrifice was somehow normalized for the Reich war.  Bella finds her way to the paper and official stories. She also finds ways, undercover, for anonymous truthtelling. 

The Gossip Columnist opens, at the frenzied end of the war, with Bella fast pedalling a bicycle, hellbent to find her sister/ Karin, an actress at a film studio, unaware of the invading Allied army..The novel careens from that present back to the fall of  Bella's family and country. While in hiding with her sister, Bella learned about many secret scandals, often sexual, of the Nazi hierarchy. Then she devisesd a scheme to put a different kind of gossip out into Berlin. Word-of-Mouth gossip quickly spread through the city. It infuriated the Nazis --and incredibly, this actually happened. 

 Aldous Huxley said, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets are human.” 

In 2026 we are experiencing a takeover to convert the United States from a democratic country created for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to a corporate business oligarchy, These entities may have fall-outs but seem united in enslaving humans to indebted lives with reduced benefits.. Progress, even suvival, hinges on the controlling objectives of business. And an indebted passive nation can be replaced by the waiting corp of AIs to serve a much smaller human population. 

Humanity's progress, linked to education or better health, let alone life expansion seems on the chopping block. Similarly, novels and films are more formulaic, rarely controversials  Art may lament the loss of nature but for many people, freedom  in the actual world is now about payment choices.

Against this backdrop of change, the story of Bella’s survival and sanity, as her country falls apart, is a lesson for anyone coping with the daily chaos created by our current political and social battles in the United States.  Like Bella,  we may yet resist oppression with humanist goals of agency and potential.  That is my hope. The current return to nature, as origin and mystery, is the way Karin relates to the world in Burke's novel. That idea also gives hope, though our culture seems loaded with charlatans among the true believers--like the path in an earlier "gilded" age. 

When Martyn Burke began this novel, he had visited Germany, seen the gilded heroic statues and architecture of the Nazis era. As this novel unfolds understanding grows  Will some future humans see the gilded White House with paved over gardens and wonder what ideology brought down the once free Americans?  The Gossip Columnist at this time is both warning and a kind of redemption. Germany has continued in a new path. Perhaps we will find a future avenue of peace and wholeness. Read this book.

S.W.