Montreal Gazette Review : Breaking Out of Convention

Andrew Steinmetz uses The Great Escape to explore his family history and invent his own genre

Fifty years ago, John Sturges’s The Great Escape was the movie of the moment. Based (with a few liberties taken) on the attempt by a group of mostly British PoWs to break out of the German prison camp Stalag Luft III in 1944, the film drew critical raves and racked up huge box office numbers. Viewers left theatres with the indelible image of Steve McQueen — well, OK, his stuntman stand-in — jumping a barbed-wire fence on his iconic Triumph motorcycle. Told that a new book is revisiting the movie on its golden anniversary, then, you’d be forgiven for assuming it would be a star-studded set of reminiscences. What you won’t be expecting is an examination of the life of a bit-part actor whose role in the film is so small his name doesn’t even appear in the credits. But that’s what Andrew Steinmetz has written, and you’ll be glad he did.

Read on...

The Brothers Kramm

A soldier takes aim on the Eastern Front, and somehow the bullet strikes home again and gain, for generations to come. The Brothers Kramm is a new story which you can find in the 'False Papers: Biography and Real Life' issue of Queen's Quarterly (Winter 2009). The Brothers Kramm, both soldiers, who served in the Third Reich, are Eva's brother's brothers-in-law (sorry, you'll need to do the math in your head). Here's a quote from near the end of my story:

"It occurs to me that what pushes people to lie and falsify is precisely the pressure to tell the truth. This is something I understood implicitly when I insisted all there was to know about my great uncle Hrolf was contained in his glass eye. It was impossible to know with certainty what the solution to his character was. And forcing the discovery of facts, pushing too hard, would deaden the chance for illumination."

The Danforth Review Interview

The tireless Michael Bryson of The Danforth Review interviews Steinmetz about Brecht and that fiction non-fiction thing. Together they generate some genre consciousness... full interview here.