A World Elsewhere
An American Woman in Wartime Germany
by Sigrid MacRae
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Pub Date Sep 08 2014 | Archive Date Oct 08 2014
PENGUIN GROUP Viking | Viking
Description
Love, loss, death, courage, and survival all play a part in Sigrid MacRae’s A WORLD ELSEWHERE: An American Woman in Wartime Germany (Viking; on-sale: September 8, 2014; $27.95; 978-0-670-01583-2). This stirring narrative is the extraordinary and heartbreaking story of the author’s German father who died before she was born and her mother’s journey with six young children through war-torn Germany to reach the Allies.
Ten years after her mother’s death, Sigrid MacRae opened a box that revealed the singular story of her parents’ intercontinental love affair. While visiting Paris in 1927, her American-born mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Connecticut family, fell in love with Heinrich, a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. They marry. But the harsh reality of post–World War I Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomatic ambitions, and their struggling family farm north of Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941 Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, now an enemy alien living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children are forced to abandon their home and flee the advancing Russian army in an epic journey back to the country she thought she’d left behind.
This shows the side of the WWII rarely seen. It’s the story of ordinary, decent people enmeshed by a brutal regime, not as its chosen victims, but trapped nonetheless by the sweep of history. The book reveals the very different family histories that shaped Sigrid MacRae’s parents, what brought them together in love and hope, and how the coincidences of time, place, and history betrayed all their expectations.
A WORLD ELSEWHERE illustrates the “German” narrative. It shows how history and distant events shape people’s lives and the never-ending dilemma of refugees and dislocation, an endemic part of the modern condition.
About the Author
Sigrid MacRae is the coauthor of Alliance of Enemies, about the undercover collaboration between the American OSS and the German Resistance to end World War II. She holds a graduate degree in art history from Columbia University. She lives in New York City.
Advance Praise
“A WORLD ELSEWHERE is a literary masterpiece, fully realized, and a perfect work of art, a daughter’s eloquent monument to her courageous mother. It is also a reminder that war spares no one but wounds everyone it touches.”—Edmund White, author of Inside a Pearl
“This is family history as story, carefully researched, beautifully written, and impossible to put down.”
—Blaine Harden, New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14
“Only a person of superb literary gifts and exquisite sensibility could have done justice to this great story. The excitements and horrors of wartime are brought vividly to life, and the reader remains spellbound with each turn of the von Hoyningen-Huene family saga. The heroic mother, the romantic, idealistic father, the band of beautiful spunky children—I will never forget any of them.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag
“This subtle, beautifully crafted book tells a moving story of love, exile and survival from the frozen Neva river to the Loire valley, from Hitler’s Berlin to the shores of Maine. A vivid family memoir and an unforgettable portrait of a woman who braved all to bring her family to safety.”
—Caroline de Margerie, author of American Lady
“Sigrid MacRae manages to find a window into Germany during World War II we’ve never looked through before, an unputdownable true story of courage and love, beautifully realized on the page, and a reading experience that will break your heart in a good way.”
—Mary-Rose MacColl, author of In Falling Snow
“In this compulsively readable telling of an American mother’s escape with six children from wartime Germany, Sigrid MacRae brings to life the struggle faced by refugees everywhere, as well as acts of kindness that redeem the atrocities of war. I rooted for Aimee’s ingenuity and courage all the way home!”—April Smith, author of A Star for Mrs. Blake
“Using her parents’ letters written during this devastating time, MacRae does a fine job of portraying the fear and uncertainty felt by her mother, living in a strange land and torn by loyalties…deftly fashioned.”—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] thought-provoking chronicle….fascinating…”—Publishers Weekly
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780670015832 |
| PRICE | $27.95 (USD) |
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