The story of two women with a shared secret – touching and captivating
The German city of Stendal in the 1930s: It is here that Margo and Helene’s paths cross. Margo is an apprentice accountant and she knows what she wants: a challenging job and responsibility. Helene is a photographer and by the time she meets Helene she has already risked a great deal. She has been caught in the crossfire of the Spanish Civil War. Alard von Sedlitz, a charismatic young man from Silesia, shows up with her in Stendal, and both women fall in love with him.
They are separated by war and persecution. While fleeing in 1945, Margo loses her child and nearly loses her life. She builds a new existence for herself in West Germany, with Henri, whom the war has robbed of all illusions. Helene, who has survived Buchenwald, is trained as an “ambassador of peace” by the Stasi in East Berlin. The two women meet again at the height of the Cold War, connected by a family secret and guided by the Stasi. But even the fall of East Germany doesn’t mean the end of their dramatic entanglement, which lasts all the way to the final year of the twentieth century.
Cora Stephan tells contemporary history through family history, developing characters whom we follow with great suspense, driven by the desire to get to the bottom of the mystery of love, kinship and betrayal that binds them.
