You Are Not Like Other Mothers, Angelika Schrobsdorff, Corinna Gepner

In this biographical account, considered in Germany to be one of the most important books on interwar Germany, Angelika Schrobsdorff retraces the adventure of her mother Else, an exceptional woman, born Jewish in Belle Époque Berlin, freed from the prejudices of her time, whose life, long devoted to a happy bohemian existence, would ultimately be crushed by the violence of history. Else left her family out of a desire for independence, married a poet and then a Prussian squire whose family had Nazi sympathies, frequented all the brilliant and rebellious minds of 1920s Berlin, experimented with the freest sexuality, sincerely converted to Christianity, raised her children without telling them of their origins, only to find herself at the end caught up in a horror she refused to believe in... and forced by the ordeal to discover a courage and foresight in herself that she had sometimes lacked until then.