It must be the lack of both snow and trains that curiously cast my mind back to a set book at secondary school. "Die Fahrt in den heiligen Abend" was a novel as far as I can recall describing a group of passengers on a train battling through snow on Christmas Eve. The only other thing I can remember about it was that I was affected by it at the time. Nothing else remains and it has been difficult to find even a synopsis on the Web.
However, I believe I have discovered why our half-Jewish, probably Communist, German master gave the book little attention. It turns out that the author, Wilhelm Schäfer, had been a favourite of the Nazis. While never a member of the NSDAP (Nazi party), he subscribed to the nationalistic, ultra-conservative, aspects of the Hitler message and was happy to propagandise for them. He was important enough to the Nazis for Goebbels to put him on his "heaven-blessed" list of crucial artists.
All that back-story must, ten years after the end of the war, have been clear to the board who had set the book. One wonders if the community of Nazi sympathisers whose views survived the conflict was rather larger than was obvious at the time or even in retrospect. I should emphasise that I do not remember an overt nationalistic message in the book, merely a conservative religiosity.
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