Description: The Karnau Tapes is a novel told in two voices, that of Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer involved in a gruesome yet highly scientific, and -- for him -- fascinating project, and eight-year-old Helga, the eldest child of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Karnau is charged with recording the sounds of human voices in extreme situations. The project takes him from Nazi party rallies to the eastern front, where he spends his time recording the screams of the wounded and the death rattles of the dying. Meanwhile, Helga can hear the sounds of the disintegration of her familiar world: her mother's instability, her father's infidelity, his pathetic denial that defeat is near.

During the final days of the Reich, Karnau and the Goebbels family are brought together in Hitler's bunker, where Karnau has been summoned to record the Fuhrer's last utterances and where Helga and her siblings await a terrible fate.

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