LatinosUSA

Synopsis

On her 21st birthday, Maria, Baroness von Wintzingerode embarks on the German ship “Deutschland” for a round-the-world journey. Her first stop is a visit to the farm of a boarding school friend in South West Africa (Namibia). There she is stranded when World War I breaks out and the “Deutschland” is requisitioned by the military. No longer a welcome house guest, Maria is a penniless lodger. She meets Peter, Baron von Lüttwitz who owns a farm in the African German Colony. They marry and have a daughter, Gerda-Maria. When the British victors expel German settlers to their homeland, the family is among them. They return to Peter’s birthplace in Silesia where Peter’s father is the esteemed patriarch of a baroque castle and large estate. Two sons, Hubertus and Heio, are born and life is idyllic for several years until Peter decides to return to Africa and the estate falls into disrepair.

The following chapters recount the years of the Weimar Republic, when Maria and her three children live in the small town of Hirschberg near the snow-capped Carpathian Mountains and witness the rise of Hitler. World War II forces Maria, her daughter, and her granddaughter to flee to western Germany. There, the granddaughter, Ute, is the comfort and joy of the women whose two husbands and both sons are killed in combat. Chaos, deprivations, and struggles for survival in postwar West Germany are described in detail. These are also Ute’s growing-up years.

On a student trip to the Middle East in the early nineteen-sixties, Ute meets an American student, Ronald Carson. They fall in love and Ute follows him to America. Two cultures collide but also bring fresh insights and fulfillment. Ute’s and Ron’s professional lives are chronicled, as is their family life with children and grandchildren. Personal memories are interwoven with cultural and political observations throughout the narrative. Ute continues to struggle with her fear, first voiced to her grandmother, that life is fragile, full of sadness and tears, and that happiness can suddenly disappear.

The book closes with the aging couple reflecting on what it means to be in love while growing old together.   

What are people saying?

  This book seems to be more than just one book. It feels like a saga. Many stories woven through more than one century. It’s an actual true history passed down from mother to daughter to grandchild of an aristocratic family, of once wealthy landowners, braided into those of barons, baronesses, counts and countesses, just before the beginning of the first World War in Germany. And it traces a courageous line of women through two world wars and more, telling of tragedies and joys, losses of sons, of fortunes, of survival through challenging times and circumstances, of finding love, and of deep bonds between mother and daughter.

   She writes lush, beautiful descriptions of landscape, flora and fauna of many countries. Years of European history through the lives of these women, including a personal account of a grandmother’s scary experience with Nazi officials which chilled me in the pit of my stomach and reminded me of what’s happening right now in this country.

   And the story continues today, through Ute, (a countess herself) and the writer of this amazing journey of her remarkable family and her own very full life in this country today.

   Woven through it all is the bright thread of love for family and friends, past and present, and for all the many beautiful and wondrous things that life can be in spite of everything.

– Drena Williams Bowerman-artist, poet, mother, fellow traveler

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From late 19th-century colonial Southwest Africa to pre-and post-World Wars I and II central Europe to modern America, Ute Carson takes us on the personal journey that makes her the woman she is today. This unflinchingly honest, well-told memoir contains drama, sadness, love, anger, betrayal, and joy. It is a family story of three long-lived women-Carson, her mother, and her grandmother-all survivors. Readers see the tumultuous and frightening world they navigated as their family, derived from nobility, lived and ultimately escaped, not unscathed, Nazi Europe. Carson gives us very human renditions of herself and her loved ones, including flaws, but always told with caring and insight. Time Did It provides a different perspective from what we thought we knew about 19th and 20th-century Europe, told through the lives of this remarkable family.

– Todd L.Savitt, PH.D., Department of Bioethics and International Studies, Brody School of Medicine.

Purchase links

To purchase a signed copy, email utecarson@hotmail.com, or order on Ute’s website http://www.utecarson.com.

You can also order an unsigned copy here: