Kelly Rimmer has this way of immediately enveloping you in a story, making you feel like you are right in Huntsville living alongside Sofie. I thoroughly enjoy the intimacy and emotional intelligence of her stories, and I am already eager for what’s next. Highly recommended for all hist fic fans. As the roundup of Jews begins Sofie hides her best friend Mayim (Jewish) for as long as they are able. It was a tough time for Annaliese, and she was confiding in Alexander even though she knew it was wrong to treat him kindly and give him extra food. She had to tread lightly to not get him in more trouble. Julius refuses to see the risk, insisting his powerful friends will protect him. But Edith finds herself scared that her husband may be declared her enemy. And if that happens, how will she protect him?

At the same time in a small Texas town, Lizzie, her brother, and parents are losing their farm to the dust bowl years during the Depression. When their parents die, Lizzie and henry move to El Paso to scrape by until Lizzie meets a widower who is a scientist and marries her. Lizzie assumes the role of housewife and Henry goes off to war. My second novel: Daughters of the Silk Road follows the journey of a family of merchant explorers who return to Venice from China with a Ming Vase. The book again straddles two time zones. Bernstein, George, and Lottelore Bernstein. "Attitudes toward Women's Education in Germany, 1870-1914." International Journal of Women's Studies 2 (1979): 473–488. The total fertility rate (TFR) in Germany is 1.44 births per woman (2016 estimates), one of the lowest in the world. [31] Childlessness is quite high: of women born in 1968 in West Germany, 25% stayed childless. [32] The social and political sacrifices…told through her cast …allowed for important compelling questions to be examined.Sofie’s story centers on how her genius husband, Jurgen, is physically and financially forced to work for the Nazi party and eventually join the SS. As much as they despise the Nazis, they know they must toe the line to protect their children and save their own lives. This is especially painful since Sofie’s best friend, Mayim, is Jewish. After the war, Jurgen is kidnapped by the United States under Operation Paperclip. He is initially held prisoner at Fort Bliss, then allowed his freedom and the right to bring his family to America. My last two novels are set in 20th century. 'The Photograph' tells the story of Hungarian refugee Rachael who escapes to London from Budapest in 1956. Travelling to Sardinia with her archaeologist father, she meets the man who will change her life. Meanwhile in 2018, her anthropologist grand-daughter Sophie is struggling with infertility. As their two stories intertwine, Sophie uncovers her grandmother's secret. War..Oh no you may be thinking...Another WWII novel? Aren't there enough? Yet, I am overjoyed that I refused to let those sentiments enter my brain as I would have missed out on reading this accomplished powerful book. Why should you read this? One, because it will give you a whole different perspective from the Germans' point of view. What about the Germans who abhorred the Reich but felt trapped into joining for fear of losing their families' and their own lives. What part does morality play here when thousands are being murdered? What principles go into making that decision? What was it like to have your children inoculated into Hitler's propaganda watching them spew hate while neighborhood watch dogs would report you if they felt that you were not being supportive.? What if you always had to sneak conversations under the covers for fear of listening bugs? I had often thought of the latter but not in reference to the Germans themselves. This book of historical fiction is gleaned from a true narrative about Operation Paperclip. "Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 Nazi German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. Conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), it was largely carried out by special agents of the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). Many of these personnel were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party."

I really enjoy WW2 historical fiction, especially when it offers an unusual perspective that I don’t normally come across in this genre. Debbie Rix has blended fact with fiction, creating a plot that’s interesting. The story follows Annalise, married to Hans who is a Dr in medicine, but his passion lies in research. To promote his career, he sales his soul to the devil and joins the SS. Hans is assigned to Dachau, a concentration camp that is renowned for human experimentation. The story gets a little repetitive in between, so the middle part feels slightly dragged. (This doesn’t make a big difference in the audio version but might work against those reading the book.) The German Wife has timelines from Nazi Germany, the debilitating drought and Dust Bowl of Texas in the 1930s and life in post war Alabama.Whether it be the living the terror in the rise of Nazism, the literal and figurative suffocating Depression in Texas of the 1930s or the segregation of Southern life in 1950s USA, Kelly takes you there. What comes out clearly in each locale is that no journey is easy. When freedoms and choices are stripped away, sacrifices will have to be made … but at what cost? This is an interesting but disturbing German perspective on World War II, both before, during, and after the war. Annaliese goes from a young woman in love with her husband, Hans, to someone married to a monster, a doctor at Dachau concentration camp. When she meets Alexander, a prisoner sent to work in her garden, she learns the horrific truth about Dachau and her husband’s role there. I used to think that I would never show sympathy for an SS officer until I read this book. Hans's actions, his decisions to save himself and his wife, aroused in me a wave of worries and fear, and sometimes simply led to bewilderment.

What I loved most about this book was the different perspectives we got and how the war affected people differently. It was nice to see all the different points of view on this one to really get a feel for how people felt on different sides and in different countries. I wished that Lizzie had learned about Sofie and what they had to endure. You can see that Sofie lived in an impossible situation and Lizzie can be as self righteous as she likes not having been there, she was prejudiced to people with no idea what they went through. Everyone was tarnished with the same brush.

Some audio books leave a deep imprint on your heart. They take you to another time and place as you listen to the author's words. Not until "The German Wife" did I fully embrace the impact Hitler's reign had on the people that lived through it. This book is based on unforgettable true events. The roles of German women have changed throughout history, as the culture and society in which they lived had undergone various transformations. Historically, as well as presently, the situation of women differed between German regions, notably during the 20th century, when there was a different political and socioeconomic organization in West Germany compared to East Germany. [3] In addition, Southern Germany has a history of strong Roman Catholic influence. [4] Historical context [ edit ] The traditional role of women in German society was often described by the so-called " four Ks" in the German language: Kinder (children), Kirche ( church), Küche ( kitchen), and Kleider (clothes), indicating that their main duties were bearing and rearing children, attending to religious activities, cooking and serving food, and dealing with clothes and fashion. However, their roles changed during the 20th century. After obtaining the right to vote in 1918, German women began to take on active roles previously performed by men. After the end of World War 2, they were labeled as the Trümmerfrauen or "women of the rubble" because they took care of the "wounded, buried the dead, salvaged belongings", and participated in the "hard task of rebuilding war-torn Germany by simply clearing away" the rubble and ruins of war. [5]I felt the whole book was really well written and the author must have worked for months doing the research. It kept a pretty good pace and I don’t usually enjoy multiple POV over 2 time frames but this worked very well for this book. I felt it gave the whole book a well rounded finish. Debbie created an amazing cast of well drawn and developed characters who, love them or hate them, were given loud and clear voices with which to make this storyline very their own. They were all definitely a multi-faceted, complex jigsaw of human emotions, with personal agendas and motives, many of which were not always compelling or easy to identify with. They were often selfish, volatile, raw and passionate, which could make them unreliable yet strangely vulnerable, mentally scarred and broken and always somehow searching for that just-out-of-reach, illusive sense of truly belonging. As they were seldom true to themselves, with little if any synergy between them, finding them in any way genuine or believable, was always going to be a challenge. All that having been said however, I found them all quite addictive in their own way and the character I could most relate to is poor Sasha, who is destined to never really remember or get to know the man he called ‘father’, and who only gets the opportunity to meet and engage with his birth father when the man is elderly and is the only person left who can answer any of his questions with honesty.

A third of young men in Germany think violence against women is 'acceptable,' study finds". 11 June 2023. During The Great Depression, in a little town called Oakden, Lizzie and her parents and her older brother Henry lived on a farm. The farm was loosing money but the family was desperately trying to keep it in their possession. Then great dust storms appeared and seeped into every nook and cranny it could find. The streams and ponds dried up. One particularly bad dust storm caused tragedy to find its way onto Lizzie’s family farm. Lizzie and Henry were forced to leave the farm and reinvent themselves in El Paso, Texas. Lizzie’s husband, Calvin is the General Manager of the fledgling space program, dubbed Operation Paperclip, and he has been assured that none of his talented German scientists were Party members. He’s not entirely convinced, but the chance to have these brilliant men working for America overrides his personal misgivings. what i loved—and will forever love—about historical fiction, specifically around WW2, is how much i learn. this is a story i NEVER knew about and couldn’t even imagine happening and being true history. contained people who did not conform — then they became forced labor camps— until eventually the death camps were built: the gas chambers.The German Wife by Kelly Rimmer was poignant, gripping, emotional and riveting. I must admit that cried openly at parts and smiled at other parts. It was the kind of story that made me want to keep reading. The German Wife was about love, family, choosing, recognizing good and evil, right and wrong and having faith in others. It was an unforgettable historical fiction novel that explored prejudice and relevant questions that pertained to choices people chose to make and follow. The German Wife took a close look at what it was like for the women and their husbands living under the tyranny of the Nazis. I really enjoyed The German Wife by Kelly Rimmer and recommend it very highly. What a rollercoaster ride through the atrocities during WWII, to love, to just trying to get by and survive. Breaking Male Dominance in Old Democracies.Oxford University Press 2013. Edt Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar; pg 205: "Concerning gender equality issues, some policies improved; for example, marital rape was finally prohibited. Germany was until 1997 one of the few post-industrialized countries where marital rape was not forbidden. The law was forced by female politicians from all parties and women's rights activists. In fact, it was one of the few instances where women from all parties supported a proposal, finally convincing the male MPs of their parties to agree. Women had been lobbying for this law for years, but were not heard until the late 1990s, when the number of women in all parties had increased." [2]