A richly textured portrait of one woman’s struggle to maintain selfhood in an increasingly hostile landscape
The luminous and bookish Hélène arrives in decadent Weimar-era Berlin as a young woman with aspirations of becoming a doctor. As the city’s carefree ambiance darkens and her fiancé is killed during a protest at the Reichstag, Hélène’s grief gives way to a determination to keep her lineage a secret: she is half-Jewish. When a handsome Luftwaffe officer professes his love and offers her a forged Aryan identity, she accepts his offer of marriage—yet the steps she takes for self-preservation lead her down a harrowing path.
Based on Julia Franck’s international bestselling novel Die Mittagsfrau — winner of the German Book Prize and translated into 37 languages.