The Motif of Harmful Sensation

Gerard Hetz, secret agent in the employ of Nazi Germany, is sent to Paraguay to establish safe houses for the ODESSA Project. In 1931 Berlin, Detective Dietel vainly strives to find the perpetrator of a series of child murders. Filmmaker Herman Dansk prepares his masterpiece, a movie that will reveal the truth to anyone who watches it. In 1999, Peter Rafennes finds a videotape on his doorstep one morning, containing Dansk's movie. And the murders investigated by Dietel seem to be repeating in Los Angeles 68 years later, unless psychologist Alan Thrush can find their source. And it all has something to do with some paintings by the artist Emil Czakó, paintings whose demonic power appears to have been key to both the Nazis' initial success and their ultimate demise. The Motif of Harmful Sensation looks at the secret history of the twentieth century from several angles, in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson and Thomas Pynchon.