Description

Knight, The Mainz Papers, recounts events of the middle 1st century BCE co-mingled with flashback reminiscences of a late twentieth century nineteen-year-old.

Not a light read, the author, Janos Kohl, son of German immigrants, had been thrust back in time and records his travails through his own unusual viewpoint, with editor Harald Jennings, a modern post-doctoral fellow, interpreting the work with a rigor reminiscent of modern Greek and Roman classics.

The book reveals the mind of a strange youth thrust into a strange world-a trip in time as unexpected as any imagined or recorded. Historically accurate on so many levels but then simultaneously fictional on all levels as well, it ends with a subtle twist revealing an ever so slightly changed alternate reality.

Kohl, suffering a retrograde amnesia, awakens and is immediately captured by Germanic barbarians who, instead of killing him outright, take him into custody, their reasoning based on a loose interpretation of a myth and its attributable value added in the slave markets. Readers are instantly swept to a brutal world. Suffering a post-traumatic trauma and dissociative behaviors Kohl, speaks through the lens of his own eccentric mindset. He tells the tale of his escape from the barbarians, his perilous journey through Celtic lands, and the shocking reality of ancient Rome-strangely mingled with outlandish flashbacks of his life in the mid twentieth century. Editorial commentaries illuminate obscure details of ancient militarism, pre-nationalistic Germania, the debauchery of Rome, and little-known peculiarities of pharaonic Egyptian culture.

Editor Jennings states: "Our common understanding of the time relative to Kohl's descriptions of it...are so divergent that the reader might initially conclude that it's entirely imaginary. True, many parts of the text are unprovable, but those episodes that become authenticated often elicit complete surprise, both to casual readers as well as scholars of the Late Republican Period."