Also to my readers Karen Schwartz, Risa Miller, Dehn Gilmore, and Anjali Singh for their invaluable help at various stages of the process. My amazing agent Eric Simonoff and his colleague Raffaella de Angelis. My fierce and energetic editor, Jessica Williams, who has put blood, sweat, and tears into this book, and been a real partner in bringing it out into the world. Laura Cherkas, who went through it with a fine-tooth comb. The whole team at William Morrow—Kelly Rudolph, Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, Katherine Turro, and Doug Jones—for all their enthusiasm and hard work.

I’m also forever grateful to Alexandra Fernholz, Leonie Goetzens, Judith Hintner, Sofia Folkesson, and Hanna Ahlin for their kindness and support. And to the MacDowell Colony and the Public Library of Brookline for offering me a quiet place to write.

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

About the Author

Meet Jessica Shattuck

About the Book

Behind the Book

Questions for Discussion

Read On

Author’s Note

Additional Chapter

About the Author

Meet Jessica Shattuck

JESSICA SHATTUCK is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle; The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award; and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications. Shattuck lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

About the Book

Behind the Book

I grew up with a sense of shame about being half German. I was embarrassed by my mother’s German accent and worried that my peers would be appalled if they found out I had grandparents still living in Germany.

This shame was passed on to me by my mother, who came to America in 1963 as a nineteen-year-old au pair and never moved back to the country of her birth. In America, she received a scholarship to attend college, began a PhD in political science, and met and married my father, who is American. She did not invite her parents to the wedding. They didn’t have much money and a trip across the ocean was expensive, but she was also angry at them and at Germany. She was born in the ugliest time of World War II, and her parents had been Nazis.

It took me nearly thirty years to be able to admit this. Like many Germans of my generation and my mother’s, I referred to my grandparents’ history—if I referred to it at all—as that of “ordinary Germans.” Yes, I could admit, my grandfather fought in the war, but only as a conscripted soldier in the Wehrmacht. But as modern research and analysis have shown, there was nothing innocent or morally exculpatory about having fought in the Wehrmacht. And, like many—if not most—members of his generation, my grandfather was, at least in the beginning, an enthusiastic Nazi. As was my grandmother.