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Sign up todayEva’s Cousin
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Learn moreIn the summer of 1944, twenty-year-old Marlene is thrilled to visit her older cousin, Eva Braun—Adolf Hitler’s mistress—at the Führer’s Bavarian mountain retreat. There, Marlene finds herself in a strange paradise, a world of opulence and imminent danger, of freedom and surveillance.
The two women sneak off and skinny-dip in a nearby lake, watch films in the Führer’s private cinema, and flirt with the SS officers at the dinner table—one of whom will become Marlene’s first lover.
But soon a clandestine mission of mercy forces Marlene to question her allegiance to both her cousin and her country—and to face the chilling reality that exists outside her sheltered world.
Sibylle Knauss is the author of eight novels. She is professor of dramaturgy and scriptwriting at the Baden-Württemberg Academy of Film. She lives near Stuttgart in Germany.
Kim Edwards-Fukei was born in Berlin and grew up in Berlin, London, and Toronto. She holds a degree in Japanese and linguistics from the University of London.
Anthea Bell is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation.
Reviews
“An intimate portrait of two women at the center of history and how innocence itself can be a crime against humanity. My book of the year.”
“The book makes a compelling investigation into the mundanity of evil. Hitler is pathologized, but never diminished, as Marlene and Eva and all the rest tiptoe around him, careful not to upset him…Knauss cleverly counters Marlene’s postadolescent musings with the mythically terrible world she inhabits…These juxtapositions indict Marlene for her very innocence, and make Eva’s Cousin a powerful document of witness.”
“Based on interviews with Braun’s real cousin, the novel is a sympathetic portrait of an innocent girl who, while she seems ensconced in the heart of the Nazi empire, is actually a resistance force of one.”
“Elegantly told, Knauss’ thought-provoking novel explores Marlene’s conflicted thoughts about her cousin, the war, and the SS officer who becomes her lover. Both passively complicit and helpless, Marlene is nonetheless a character who commands the reader’s sympathy and interest.”
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