The story of Katharina Wüllner, who is born to a prosperous industrialist in Dresden in 1902, enjoys a bourgeois education, marries as befitted her social status, has four children, looses her husband and home in World War II and, completely destitute, flees to the West to begin a new life there, which once again – though in a completely different way – brings her something akin to happiness. Peter Härtling’s novel describes not just one individual fate, but gorgeously shows the interweaving of history at large with one woman’s life.
