Review: The German Heiress
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Set largely against the backdrop of Stunde Null Germany in the British-occupied city of Essen, The German Heiress follows the efforts of Clara Falkenberg, a former heiress to the Falkenberg mines and ironworks, to find out what happened to her dearest friend. At the close of WWII, Clara, knowing that her family's apparent complicity with the Nazi regime would spell disaster, fled Essen under an assumed name and has spent almost two years in Hamlin where, as the book opens, she finds the man with whom she's been involved is a doctor who sterilized children in the camps at Ravensbruck. Appalled, Clara tries to return to Essen to find out why her friend Elisa has not replied to her letters. She finds a British intelligence officer, Captain Fenshaw, is hot on her trail, seeking to charge her with war crimes, just as her father is charged and awaiting trial in Nuremberg. But Clara is more worried about the fact that her beloved Elisa is missing. Her house has been destroyed, another family is living in its cellar, and her son is also missing. Dealing with her own haunted memories of all that she and Elisa tried to do to shelter the factory's forced laborers, part of Clara almost feels as if she thinks she should be caught if only she knows her friend is safe. She looks back at her parents' choices - her British-born mother was a greater supporter of Hitler than was her German father- and questions why they didn't leave Germany when they saw the rising Third Reich, the pogroms, the influx of forced laborers - and questions everything the Falkenbergs did over the past decade. Her beautiful town of Essen, heavily bombed at the end of the war, is in a chaotic state. For the survivors, there are hard questions about what they did to survive the war and what they will do to survive in its aftermath.
While trying to evade Fenshaw, she meets Jakob, a discharged German soldier who lost his leg in the campaign on the Eastern Front. Following the death of his parents, he is struggling to provide for his younger sisters, including one who is pregnant by a British soldier who left her in the lurch. Jakob makes his living, like so many, on the black market. He, too, is looking for Elisa. Together they try to unravel the truth of what happened to her in March of 1945, and the truth about her teenage son Willy.
This is a tightly written novel of historical fiction that encourages the reader to contemplate the spectrum of resistance in WWII. It also captures the terrible outcome of a regime that encouraged children to report on their own parents.
The audiobook is beautifully narrated by Lisa Flanagan, who captures some of the accents handsomely.
I received a Digital Review Copy and a paper review copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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