A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany

The extraordinary love story of an American blueblood and a German aristocrat—and a riveting tale of survival in wartime Germany

Sigrid MacRae never knew her father, until a trove of letters revealed not only him, but the singular story of her parents’ intercontinental love affair. In Paris in 1927, her mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Hartford family, falls in love with a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. But the harsh reality of post-WWI Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomatic ambitions, and their struggling family farm north of
Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children flee the advancing Russian army in an epic journey, back to the country she thought she’d left behind.