Water under Desert Sand 

Range of topics: 

Life of a man from his youth in an educated middle-class environment in Bielefeld to his death. Increasing misery of the civilian population in World War I. Work in peace and prosperity in Sweden, on a farming cooperative in Paraguay and on a dairy project in Mongolia. Expedition orders in Mongolia and by Sven Hedin in Tibet. Collaboration at the University of Peking. Search for missing persons in Mongolia. Changes in Nazi Germany and World War II. East Asia correspondent in Manchukuo, worked in the Canaris resistance group. Entry of Soviet troops into Manchukuo. Capture, exile, death in the Gulag. 

Frame of reference: 

The novel tells the story of my father's life in the warlike first half of the 20th century and is based on data from the plot and background from his youth to his early death. The stations of his working and research life alternate between Germany, Sweden, Par- aguay, China, Mongolia, Tibet, Manchukuo and Japan. The story is told from the perspective of the persons involved. The country-specific and historical background information is authentic. Personal reports were supplemented by extensive specialist research. 

Plot:

The overarching theme of the life of Helmut Westphal (pseudonym) is the search for a self-determined life, which over the decades finds fulfillment in a series of surprising twists and turns in an international context. As a teenager, he wishes to be able to leave his parents' house as early as possible in order to escape his father's violent upbringing. He remained connected to his mother and siblings throughout his life. He tries to finish school, which he doesn't like, in order to be able to study music and languages, in both of which he has great talent. 

During the hard times of World War I he supports his family with teaching work. At the same time, he is looking for an alternative training option in agriculture. With ambition and self-denial, he completes work assignments in the countryside. An agricultural adult education semester in Bethel brings him together with fellow students whose lives and work have made them friends for decades. The Swede among them invites his impoverished friends to work on his family's homestead. Helmut Westphal earns the money in a mine for the crossing. In Sweden he gets to know and appreciate a democratic and prosperous society. With his earnings, he completed his studies in Halle with the help of a far-sighted professor who was not afraid of tricks against bureaucracy. From then on he received a steady flow of orders from abroad. 

In Paraguay, he experiences the government's attempts to rebuild their country after a devastating war and German emigrants to create a new livelihood cooperative in the jungle, which fails. There he received an invitation to Beijing to modernize dairies with the support of a development organization in Mongolia. He quickly learns Chinese and Mongolian. In Mongolia he gets caught between the fronts of the Chinese civil war and the colonial policies of China, the Soviet Union and later Japan. He witnesses how power struggles between competing Mongolian princes are exploited by the great powers and marauding hordes violently exploit the lawlessness in the country. After the pillaging of the dairy projects, Helmut Westphal gained experience in development projects with Mongolians under the leadership of a Swede. 

After that, engagements in expeditions continued, including four years in Sven Hedin's Sino-Swedish expedition in Tibet. During his stays in Germany, he organizes events and publishes in the Atlantis and Bertelsmann publishing houses as well as in daily newspapers and trade journals. His last Mongolia expedition for a German airline brought him together with the German Embassy in Beijing. Through that he gets a job as an East Asia correspondent in the German embassy in Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo. When National Socialism accepts threatening forms he becomes a member of a resistance group against the Nazi regime under Canaris, the head of the military secret service of the state military. In Hsinking he marries a colleague and they have three children. The Soviet Union's invasion of Manchukuo in September 1945 ended the Japanese autocratic occupation regime. Helmut Westphal suffers the fate of all 'opponents' of the Soviet Union, is deported to several gulags, imprisoned in prisons, including the Lubjanka, and dies in a gulag in northern Siberia in 1949. His wife and three children flee to Harbin, where his wife dies. The Siberian grandmother takes care of the children until they can flee to Germany in an IRK refugee transport by ship to post-war peace 

It is a contemporary witness novel that vividly shows the consequences of striving for power and wars on individuals and entire peoples and their social, cultural and economic development. The fate of the protagonists is repeated hundreds of thousands of times.