Diary of a U-boat Commander

What makes this book remarkable is its audacious conceit: a Royal Navy officer writing as a German U-boat commander, so convincingly that readers long believed the diary was genuine. Published in 1929 under the pseudonym 'Etienne,' it presents itself as a discovered document from Captain Karl von Schenk, a proud Prussian nobleman whose wartime service in the Kaiser's submarine fleet reads as a relentless series of triumphs against the Royal Navy's best efforts to destroy him. Von Schenk is magnificently self-assured, convinced of his own handsomeness, his superior breeding, and his inevitable victory. Yet his diary reveals vulnerabilities he himself cannot see: a blind spot about the futility of his cause, and a reckless affair with a woman named Zoe in occupied Bruges who belongs to a more powerful German officer. The affair ends catastrophically, in a twist that blind-sides both von Schenk and the reader. Beneath the adventure lies a sharp satirical portrait of German military arrogance, rendered with the insider knowledge of a man who knew the enemy intimately.