Synopsis

 Sublime Dissonance, is a story of how three musicians, a German-American, two Germans, and their families navigate the turbulent journey from Germany’s ascendance during the Bismarck era through the jarring shocks of the world wars of the last century.     

 Two lead characters are Karl, a boy in a small Oregon town, and Otto, his contemporary in Stuttgart. Both grow up near the turn of the last century under the heavy influence of fathers who preach their strong faith in the preeminence of German culture and industry. Karl is shy but musically gifted and dependent on the violin for expression. His father pushes him to become a virtuoso violinist, and Karl dutifully pursues this vision by attending the Royal Conservatory in Stuttgart. Debonair Otto is as conversant with socializing as he is with the cello. Unlike Karl, Otto has to overcome his father’s insistence that he pursue an engineering career over music.

 At the Conservatory, Karl and Otto become close friends. Karl quickly becomes the rising star violinist and Otto a master cellist. A turning point comes when Karl meets Marie, an oboist and an orphan raised in a convent. The two are paired in performing a beautiful Bach duet. Their ensuing love affair is strained by the tension between Karl’s Baptist upbringing and Marie’s burgeoning personality as a feminist in Germany’s socialist movement. This part of the novel closes with Karl, Marie, and Otto going on a chamber concert tour that ends when a jeolousy-blinded Karl impulsively abandons Marie and Otto on the mistaken belief that Marie slept with a concert patron. In fact, she was drug raped and later gives birth to Karl’s daughter. Karl is unaware of the pregnancy and doesn’t learn the true facts until later. Meanwhile Otto and Marie become lovers, and Otto assumes the role of the baby’s father.

 On his return to Oregon, Karl achieves success as a soloist which is cut short by the U.S. entering World War I. In short order, German-Americans become suspected spies and collaborators of the German Reich. In this atmosphere, Karl loses work and then the strength of his bow hand when young thugs crush the hand with a stone.

 During the inter-war years, Karl is forced to adapt to his new reality. He becomes a choir director for an anti-war movement, marries a Baptist pianist, and resettles in California where he must transition from virtuoso to violin teacher. In their correspondence, Karl learns that Otto survived WWI with a disfiguring war injury and that Marie was killed in a paramilitary assault against the German communists shortly after the 1918 armistice.

 Years later, Otto enters the stage again when he is imprisoned in Nuremberg awaiting trial for alleged war crimes based on his limited role in the design of the “gas trucks” that were used to asphyxiate Russian soldiers and others on the Eastern Front. At Otto’s insistence, the U.S. military lawyers invite Karl to visit Otto in Nuremberg. During this emotional reunion, Otto informs Karl about his daughter and urges him to try to secure her release from a Russian POW camp. Otto also tells Karl that he has decided to accept the proposed death penalty to escape the pain of his war memories.

 Karl is able to free his daughter Maggie, a trained physician, from the POW camp where she was sexually assaulted. After briefly living with Karl in the U.S., Maggie is impelled to return to Berlin to help alleviate the suffering of the German refugees. She goes to work as a nurse at a U.S. military hospital but is fired for violating a new administrator’s policy against furnishing aid to Germans. She then opens up an orphanage in the ruins of a hotel. The same vindictive administrator tries to shutter the orphanage on the pretext of Maggie having been a nominal Nazi party member. After Karl and other Americans intervene to save the orphanage, the book ends with Karl conducting a chamber recital of the aforementioned Bach duet performed by two of the orphans.