In this episode of History Through Fiction: The Podcast, Colin Mustful welcomes author Dietrich Kalteis to discuss Rust and Bone, a haunting novel set among German settlements in Ukraine as the Second World War collapses around them. Through family memory, deep research, and historical imagination, listeners are invited into a lesser-known story of displacement, endurance, and the fragile hope that survives in the midst of ruin. Together, Colin and Dietrich explore the civilian side of World War II through the intertwined journeys of Jacob, a teenage boy fleeing a village destroyed by Soviet troops, and Frida, a young girl trying to survive the devastation near Berlin. Their conversation moves from the settlement history of Germans in Ukraine to the brutal realities of forced flight, bombed trains, hunger, cold, and uncertainty. Along the way, Dietrich reflects on how oral history from his father and the lived experience of his mother helped shape the novel’s emotional core, and how research allowed him to render trauma, fear, and resilience with both restraint and force. Dietrich Kalteis is a novelist known for crime fiction as well as historical work, including Under the Outlaw Moon and Rust and Bone. In this conversation, he speaks not only as a writer of suspense and atmosphere, but as someone drawing on family stories rooted in wartime Ukraine and Berlin—bringing rare immediacy to a story about survival, memory, and what young people discover when the world they were taught to trust collapses around them. At History Through Fiction, the past becomes most vivid when it is carried through story—through the novels, questions, and human voices that help us feel history as well as learn it. Explore the broader world of historical novels, workshops, events, and community at https://www.historythroughfiction.com.
