Berlin in the Autumn of 1989. Erika zur Linde is teaching when she’s called to the telephone where she receives the mortifying news that her father has fatally shot himself. According to his housekeeper, he received a letter from America a few days before his death in which a journalist enquired about the fate of a Jewish acquaintance of her father’s, one Felix Auerbach. Erika has never heard of him.
At her father’s house, she stumbles across her mother’s diary. It reveals Felix Auerbach to be an attractive blonde Jewish man and a school friend of her father’s. When her father is called up, her mother Sophie looks after the young man. The world of Sophie’s 19-year-old mother, a regime loyalist, is shaken to its foundations. Auerbach goes into hiding with the family but a crime committed during the last days of the war silences both husband and wife forever.
While Erika investigates further, the American journalist arrives in Berlin. He has come not only to write about the fall of the Berlin Wall but also to discover what happened to his uncle. Suddenly, everything in Erika’s world is in danger: her inheritance, her father’s reputation and even her own identity.
An impressive novel about identity, set in Berlin during the time of the fall of the wall.
Nicolas Remin was born in 1948 in Berlin. He studied comparative literature, philosophy and art history there and at the University of California at Santa Barbara. After returning from the US he worked as voice artist dubbing films into German. Today Remin lives as a freelance author in northern Germany.