Story idea

I'm working on a story that will be loosely based on the Hitler-diaries incident of the early 1980s.

As you may remember, a collector of World War II memorabilia named Konrad Kujau received 2.5 million Deutschemanks for more than 60 volumes worth of Hitler's supposed diaries, which were shown to be fraudulent soon after publication in 1983. The key evidence concerned the age of the paper on which they were written.

The scandal resulted in a memorable series of "Bloom County" comic strips. A character on that strip "discovered" the diaries of Margaret Mead, which included such idol-shaking comments as "Gee, these Samoans are really a surly bunch."
Those diaries, too, were shown to be frauds -- when someone noticed they were written on Dukes of Hazzard stationary. But stop me before I float away on my associative stream!

The 1980s scandal over the Hitler diaries has inspired me to begin work on a story. In my story the alleged diarist was Josef Stalin (which allows for a linguistic twist -- would Stalin have kept diaries in Russian? or in Georgian?) and they are 'rediscovered' in the 1990s, but with a fair amount of retrospection into the 1970s, when the key characters attended college together.

Now you know.

Oh, another sort-of personal item that may interest someone: the dahlias I thought I had planted earlier this year aren't dahlias at all. They're daffodils.