A portrait of life, generation and time, full of narrative depth and poetry.
In her autobiographical narration, Sybil Gräfin Schönfeldt describes her relationship with Heinrich, her husband: the encounter, the meeting shortly after the war, the love story and their life together. As different as their origins may be, two unhoused young people meet, experiencing the present and the past in post-war West Germany with similar thoughts and feelings. She is an officer’s daughter whose mother dies shortly after birth and who grows up with relatives. He comes, according to the racist terminology of the National Socialists, from a »family of Jewish kinship«, whose ancestors include the Mendelssohns, and by good fortune survived the war. They both work, make friends and acquaintances in the newly emerging newspaper landscape and in Hamburg’s business life during the years of reconstruction, and are close observers of their times.
With poetic tenderness, subjectivity and at the same time in great historical arcs, the author tells a fascinating double biography. The book offers a moving story of love and life covering the time of Second World War and post-war period up until the 1990s.
