Fiction by
Al Jones
THE RIMBACH PRODIGIES
Johann Friedrich Rimbach and his wife Caroline Sophie Elisabeth von Rössel come of age during the Golden Twenties, the Weimar Republic in Germany. A brilliant scientist married to a gifted soprano and virtuoso pianist, their lives seem assured. It is not to be.
Main Stage
Before the Saturn V rocket carried Neil Armstrong to the Moon, the V-2 rocket carried one-ton bombs to London. The same Germans built them both.
When World War II begins, Hans Rimbach, a professor of electrical engineering, is drafted into the German Army’s V-2 rocket program where he works under longtime friend Wernher von Braun. As Germany sinks towards defeat, his wife Lina bolts for Sweden with their children. In retaliation, Hitler sentences Hans to Dora, the SS concentration camp that builds the V-2 in underground tunnels. “Death through Work” is the SS motto for the camps. At Dora, thousands have already died.
The Hydrazine Lounge
The Space Race is on. Hans Rimbach has survived Dora. He works with von Braun and his German colleagues in Huntsville, Alabama, designing the Saturn V. His daughter Siggy overhears a chance conversation that sets Hans on the path of his Gestapo tormentors. At Siggy’s urging, her mother Lina takes on a Black piano prodigy as a student. “They will hate us both, Grace,” Lina tells her pupil, and she is right. Rockets, a rebellious teenager and civil rights form a hypergolic Sixties mixture, igniting – like hydrazine and nitric acid - on contact.
To the Sun, to Freedom
It is summer 1986 in East Berlin, twenty-five years after construction of the Berlin Wall. Pastor Peter Siefert’s wife dies before his eyes as the East German secret police, the Stasi, arrest her. In response, he joins his Calvary Lutheran Church to the dissident movements challenging the East German state. Siggy Rimbach, a nurse at the neighborhood hospital, becomes a member, attracting Stasi attention with her bold and flamboyant behavior. Her cunning and unorthodox approach to survival in East Germany unravels soon after, threatening Peter and the entire dissident group.