A German Family

Book excerpt: A German Family covers a week in the life of a mother and her two teenage children in Berlin in late 1944. The city is undergoing nightly bombing. One of the children, Hans, a Hitler Youth, is eager to be sent to the Eastern Front to help stop the advance of the Russian "hordes." The other, Heike, thirteen, has just begun to learn about sex and is unsure of how to deal with what she thinks lies in store for her. Overseeing the family is Trudi, their mother, engaged in a daily struggle to keep her children fed and relatively sane, while at the same time conducting an affair with a neighbor who may or may not be Jewish. The week covered by the novel will determine the fate of these three people, and to some degree, of Germany as a whole.