Presentation for the Commercial Anglo-Dutch Society in Amsterdam

After having given a reading in Osnabrück at the media centre of the newspaper publisher Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung (NOZ), I travelled to the Netherlands again.

In Amsterdam I gave an English-speaking presentation to the Commercial Anglo-Dutch Society (CADS), a business and networking club whose members are British and Dutch business people. They meet monthly and invite guest speakers; their mission is to build relationships and friendships between people and businesses from both countries. The meeting took place at the Koninklijke Industrieele Groote Club, directly at Dam Square in Amsterdam.

I appreciate speaking to international audiences, sharing my great-grandfather’s experiences and messages also outside Germany. Especially I like to make people think and enable them to take another perspective – one CADS member told me she had never seen history from this perspective before.

After the presentation, I came into a conversation with the members, and again I became aware of the benefit to bring out my book as an English and a Dutch translation one day. I will continue my efforts in this regards in the next weeks and contact publishers and agents.

Thanks to John Cameron-Webb, former British consul of Amsterdam, and Jennie Monon, chair of CADS, for the initiative and the invitation to speak to the society.

Next I will spend one month in Normandy at Juno Beach in France, where the Canadian Allies landed in 1944. After the first part of my reading tour, with fifteen days of non-stop working and travelling, I want to reflect on the experiences of the last weeks, get to know the Normandy and do some research, focus on the writing of my second book, endeavour translations of my first one and work on some editing and proofreading assignments.