Shelley Davidow on love in Berlin and the creative urge in 'The Girl With the Violin'

Good Reading Podcast

It's 1989 and for a young Jewish-Australian violinist, a scholarship to Berlin is the chance of a lifetime. Germany is on the verge of change as the wall is torn down, and Susanna is swept along by the tumultuous event. Under the careful guidance of Stefan Heinemeyer, her renowned violin teacher and the grandson of a Nazi, she begins a composition in memory of her grandmother, Mirla, who died in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War, and Susanna is inspired to retrace Mirla's final footsteps. It's a journey that reconnects Susanna to her heritage and propels her musical gift to extraordinary heights. Yet as a forbidden yearning for Stefan begins to unfurl, Susanna's life is forever changed, and the repercussions will echo through decades and across continents. In a world where history, society and inherited traumas threaten to silence Susanna and prevent her from ever becoming her true self, can she find the courage to reclaim her power as a woman, a musician, and a composer, and in so doing, lay her haunted past to rest? In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Shelley Davidow about her own experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the consequences of love and history across time and generations, and the Berlin of today, decades after that dramatic moment in 1989.