Michael O'Neill

Hello. Historical awareness has always been a strong force in my life; with Irish parents it could hardly have been otherwise. When I lived in Ireland, I was confronted with the past in both fireside tales and harsh reality. Then I was suffused with ‘living history’ when I lived and worked in Germany for fifteen years as a TV producer/director and scriptwriter on WWI, WWII and other historical documentaries. Many of the programmes I assisted onto the screen have been shown worldwide on a variety of TV channels such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. I was in Germany, too, when the Berlin Wall came down on that extraordinary night of November 9/10th 1989; an unforgettable moment of lightning, priceless for anyone with even a remote interest in the past. What a strange quirk of historical parallelism that ‘Crystal Night’ (Kristallnacht) in Germany, should have taken place on the 9/10th of November 1938, just over 50 years before. The future of history is unpredictable. Having also translated many German books into English, I decided to further indulge my interest in the incredible trajectories of bygone eras by making my own translated texts available online. I hope you enjoy reading them. They are voices from the past, and for me, that alone makes them absorbing reading. If it does for you, too, then I have achieved a small amount in the service of historical awareness, and that pleases me greatly. I certainly enjoyed translating the books. Germany also provided the inspiration for my first novel, "Freedom has a Thousand Charms", even though much of the plot takes place in Italy. Little did I know when I began to write it how relevant its theme would remain. Till soon.