Awake ye people..., Freedom is calling

Anton Passauer is a German exile living in Paris during the early eighteenth century. One evening, in a tavern on the city’s Left Bank, he meets a young French playwright, poet, and philosophe named Voltaire. Reluctantly Passauer reveals that he is a survivor of the Bavarian massacre at Munich in 1705. Voltaire convinces him to break his thirteen years of silence and tell his story.

It begins during the early days of the rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire’s rule, when quick rebel victories at Braunau and Burghausen forces the occupation army to react and stop the growing resistance at any cost. The Bavarian rebellion’s attempt to take back their country comes to a head in a bloody skirmish outside the walls of snow-covered Munich on Christmas Day.

Author Steve Burns infuses this historically accurate yet fictionalized tale with his fifteen years of experience living in Bavaria, Germany, and a passion for history and philosophy. The characters Passauer and Voltaire trade stories, ideas, and commentary that together create a compelling, thought-provoking, and emotional narrative. Through these pages, readers can join the band of Bavarian farmers and shopkeepers in their little-known fight against the Holy Roman Empire’s occupation in eighteenth-century Germany.