The dramatic story of a family balancing idealism and conformity
Hermann Henselmann was a charismatic idealist, steeped in the ideas of the Bauhaus and the avant-garde, who rose to become the chief architect of East Berlin after the war. The Berlin TV Tower, Stalinallee, and the City-Hochhaus skyscraper in Leipzig are all inextricably linked with his name. The price, of course, was that he he had to constantly maneuver – and sometimes even grovel – to preserve at least the foundations of his modernist vision from the boorish demands of the Socialist political leadership.
Always by his side was his wife Isi, a highly gifted woman in her own right, who also wanted to work as an architect but instead had to raise a family of eight children. She constantly swept up the pieces left by her husband, even as she increasingly emancipated herself. This is also the story of their daughter, Isa, the author's mother, who escaped her choleric father’s suffocating manipulation to forge her own thorny path in a completely different field. Intertwined with the Henselmann family story is the story of Robert Havemann, a dissident, whose wife Karin was Isi's sister amd who in contrast to Henselmann refused to let the party leadership tell him what to do.
“Florentine Anders tells the turbulent story of the extended Henselmann family. Incredibly fascinating, it offers surprising insights into Germany’s eventful recent history, from the Weimar Republic to the present day.“ - Volker Kutscher (author of the book series Babylon Berlin is based on)
