The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger is about a man who experiences the inexplicable, and then spends his life trying to explain it. Mostly set in Germany from the turn of the century until the second World War, it follows Fleischl as he repeatedly tries to convince the world that the seemingly magical events of his life did, in fact, happen. It is a historically fascinating tour through the first part of the twentieth century, an important meditation on technology and our understanding of the possible, and a book that reimagines what history and science might have to do with love.
I chatted with David about the book over Zoom.
David Rocklin is the author of the novels The Luminist and Foreward award-winning The Night Language. His new novel, The Electric Love Song Of Fleischl Berger, was published in June 2024. He is also the author of The Write Formula, a comprehensive craft book offering guidance, inspiration and practical advice on all aspects of fiction writing, including the generation and expansion of ideas, character and plot structure, setting and POV choices, outlining and revision strategy, and navigating criticism and rejection.
Seth Fischer: I love hearing historical fiction writers talk about how they discovered their stories. How did you come across this one?
David Rocklin: I was obsessing over near-death experiences, and I found a story in a medical journal of a woman in the nineties who had a sudden aneurysm on a city street. She was on the verge of death, and they had to operate on her brain to save her. In the doing of this, they had to take her to almost a zero baseline. Even if you’re unconscious, your brain is registering sensory input, and it’ll start creating waves on the EEG. So they use surgical glue, glued her eyes shut, put sound canceling headphones over her ears, taped her mouth. When she woke up a few days later, she told them that she could see what they were doing in the operating room. She could see the clock on the wall, the tools they were using. Knew what they were saying. Of course their thought was, “Oh, my God! The anesthesia didn’t work. We’re going to get our asses sued off.”
But gradually they realized this was simply not explainable. and in the article, there was a footnote. I’m a sucker for those. And it basically said that the EEG is popularly credited to a German scientist from the turn of the 20th century named Hans Berger, who in turn accidentally created it because he had had his own near-death experience. His story is essentially what happens in at the Army camp in the novel.
SF: Can you walk us through that?
DR: Sure, there’s kind of a pivotal scene in the novel, where the main character, [Fleischl Berger] having gone through some traumas involving his family, is essentially wandering the world selling flax, and he ends up at an army camp and stays overnight. There’s an accident where the cannon essentially collapses off the cliff and plummets to the beach below, which is where Fleischl is atop a horse. He sees this cannon hurtling towards him. He is certainly going to die, and in that moment all the emotions come pouring out of him. Miraculously, it misses him, but he’s grievously injured. He awakens in a bunk in the barracks suffering from hysterical blindness, and there is a telegram waiting for him that the love of his life sent virtually at the moment of the accident. In the novel, the telegram says, did you die? This is almost exactly what happened to Hans Berger in real life. There was a telegram waiting for Hans Berger that his sister sent about thirty minutes after the accident. And it basically said, “I heard you died. What happened?”
Somehow, in both the novel and in real life, at the moment of his near death, information was impossibly transmitted hundreds of miles. So in both the real-life Berger’s story and in the novel, he spends his life trying to figure out what happened.
SF: How does he figure out what happened? In particular, can you talk a little bit more about what role science plays in the book, and what it has to do with authoritarianism and cruelty?
DR: Early on, Fleischl is obsessed with proving that this thing that happened really happened. He begins to bend towards the scientific method. While he’s trying to recreate conditions and recapture the elements that caused this thing to happen, a doctor reminds him he had to almost die, and that this is going to be a necessary component of his experiments. He is not willing to bring anybody but himself close to death until the moment he realizes that if he did do that to someone else, it could potentially reunite him with the love of his life.
Again, I tend not to write around big themes. I’m not consciously saying, this is where I’m going to address fascism and the birth of the Nazi regime. I really just try to keep it very grounded to this human being contextually. What would this human being do?
Given what I know about this human being, he’s willing to step beyond what he knows to be right and wrong. And in rereading it, I realized that there are just echoes of what’s to come for Germany and for him through the personal choices that he makes.
And if you did not know the history of Nazi medical experiments, and if you were on the military side, you could say they’re all justified. We need to know what pressure is going to do to our servicemen. We must keep them safe. We need to know how to make them more resistant to disease. We have to keep them safe. It sounds so altruistic until you pull out and realize that this was essentially condoned torture, not in the name of science, but in the name of eugenics.
SF: Can you talk a little bit more about the sort of dueling impulses between magic and science for Fleischl?
DR: There was a really conscious decision with Fleischl never to depict him as chasing the divine. I defer to the characters that I’m writing at a certain point, and he had no interest in that. They begin to talk back to you, and they emerge as their own people. He was trying to prove that this thing happened to him, because nobody believed him. It cost him everything. But at the same time, he’s trying to harness the elements of lightning and terror and modify a dead body into something that can jump when pulsed with an electrical current. It’s very alchemical. It’s black arts, in a certain sense, but it’s also true that science looks like the black arts until everybody accepts the result as factually proven.
SF: I wanted to ask you about researching Germany. It’s my heritage, as my last name makes clear, but obviously, Germany’s place in the historical or collective unconscious is, in many ways deservedly, that of World War II, the Nazis, and the holocaust. And you do end the book there. But there’s a lot that happened before that: Weimar, silent films, World War I, the telegraph. Can you talk a little bit more about what your research looked like?
DR: It’s a lot of research. It’s a lot of time spent with images, with maps, with articles from newspapers written at the time. If I can find them, firsthand accounts, journals, diaries. I’m very visual, so I’ll take anything I can stare at and sort of put myself into. I don’t start writing until it feels not like a story I’m making up, but like a memory of something that happened to me. It took me a long time to imagine my way into Stralsund. but I was very lucky in that. I actually met somebody on Instagram who was German citizen, but kind of travels all over, and she was also a photographer who does absolutely gorgeous black and white work. and she apparently saw a post of mine. She said, “Oh, I have a lot of images from Stralsund. Would you like to see them?” And I’m like, “That would be amazing!” That gave me entry into the fact that this was a beautiful, lovely home for people before fascism and hatred ravaged it.
I had to imagine my way past my own biases of what I thought Germany was. It was a lot for me , because I had to imagine my way past my own Jewish heritage to find what it might have been before. So whenever I watch a German expressionist silent film, I perceive hard edges, I perceive a certain steeliness. But there is also absolutely a childish, wide-eyed wonder of the unexplained. If you watch Metropolis, or The Golem, or The Woman in the Moon, or The Magician with Paul Wagner, you can’t get away from it. It’s suffused with a sense of the world as absolutely capable of creating wonder and magic.
