Die Mittagsfrau

The novel tells the life of Helene Würsich, from her childhood in Bautzen at the start of the 20th century, through her years as a young woman in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, to her life as a wife and mother under the Nazi regime. It is framed by a prologue and epilogue centred on her son, Peter. The prologue follows him on the day in 1945 when his mother leaves him, aged about seven, alone at a railway station amid the chaos after the war. That abandonment is the premise from which the rest of the novel unfolds.