Dear Ms. Westfall,
I have finished reading An Honorable German by Charles McCain. I left off when Max and his crew on Graf Spee had to fight another British ship. The ship was badly damaged so they had to stop in Uruguay to try to repair the ship. The Uruguayan government didn’t give them enough time so they were forced to blow up the ship after two days. The book then switches to when Max is on this ship called Meteor. Soon Meteor was in a huge battle and only a few of the men went into lifeboats while the rest had died. Max and a few others survived until a U-boat came to rescue them. Max is then in a hospital in France and his fiancée Mareth came to see him. Max gets time on leave and stays with Mareth in France. Max then gets captured by the Gespeto and is saved by Mareth’s father. He then has to go to a diner with and admiral who awards Max the Iron Cross as well as a promotion. Max gladly accepts both and goes to training on a U-boat. When Max is in training his U-boat almost sinks but he finds out how to make it float again. Keep losing battery and then Max says that they have to go because the submarine is going to crash. Somehow they get backs to shore.
After the training Max battles a ship and then goes to Berlin. There he meets Mareth again and when she takes off her coat she is wearing the Nazi uniform because she works in the Zoo Tower. Max gets angry but she then shows him the Zoo Tower and they make up. Following there is an air raid and then they go to the hotel. Max has to he have diner with navy commanders though he doesn’t really want to go. Max then receives a letter saying that Mareth’s mom died but he didn’t think much of it. At the dinner the admiral tells max that he has to go to Florida. Mac goes to the coast of Florida and sinks an American passenger ship by accident. Max tried save the passengers but his U-boat sank and then he becomes a prisoner of war at Camp Taylor. The Americans hate him but he and Carls escape. There are wanted signs everywhere, but they go on a train anyway. They sit in the tram with African Americans who bring them back to Camp Taylor. When he gets back he is sent to a new camp. Max tries to blend in with the Nazis but he eventually escapes the camp with a guy called Heinz. The book ends with Max’s father sending a letter to Mareth’s father telling him that he, Mareth, and Max are in Mexico and they are all out of the war.
This book was interesting and I enjoyed the fact that Max differed from the Nazis. Since Max didn’t count himself as a Nazi, I think that that added a different yet interesting aspect to the story. I also liked how whenever he was asked about being a Nazi he said he was a German patriot.
One interesting twist on the whole “German patriot” idea occurred after Max was freed from the Gestapo. Mareth told him that her father called the Gestapo and he convinced them to let him go and Max was surprised that her father had that much power in Nazi Germany. One thing that this shows about Nazi Germany is how they hid this from people in the navy and how deceitful the Nazis were. The reader knows that the Nazis hid this from the navy because when Max came to Berlin he didn’t know about the air raids, which makes the reader think, “What else doesn’t Max know about?”
Since Max doesn’t accept being a Nazi, I think that when he saw that Mereth wearing a Nazi uniform he felt as if she betrayed him, even though she says that she is just being a German patriot.
One thing that I found interesting was how Max said that everybody thinks that a sailors’ life is perfect with the brass buttons and girls who love them but it really isn’t a perfect life. Max then proceeds to tell the reader about he hardships of being in the war.
The life of a sailor is pretty simple for me to understand because in history we read All Quiet in the Western Front which basically told the reader of what the soldiers had to deal with and the effects war had on them so that basically helped me understand what Max was dealing with.
Another thing that surprised me was how much Max cared for his father’s approval of what he was doing. This happened when Max flashbacked to when he was trying to be a soldier and he had to hang on to an electrical bar for as long as he could and Max said that, “He dared not disappoint himself or, worse, disappoint his father” (McCain p. 134). Max held on until he blacked out which shows a lot about Max’s character because he cares more about satisfying his father than himself.
One thing that struck me as odd yet interesting was when Max told the reader that his father didn’t approve of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews but that he had to put up with it because he was a German patriot.
The idea of being a German patriot came up a lot in this book but in a twisted way because I don’t think that Max considers Mareth’s father a patriot because he is with the Nazis but Mareth considers her father a patriot because he joined the Nazis before Hitler started the laws against the Jews.
I liked how the book overall is in the German perspective because normally people perceive all of the Germans to be bad and after reading this book it made the British and Americans seem bad. So I think that McCain picked a good perspective to write the story from because people usually say that German soldiers that fought in WWII are evil, but after reading the book Max is anything but evil. To begin with Max says he isn’t a Nazi and when he accidentally attacked the American ship he tried to save the people who were still on the ship, so I don’t think that Max is evil.
I did like this book and I would definitely recommend it, more specifically, for somebody who enjoys reading war novels.
Sincerely, Maria Espinoza
