Good-Bye to the Mermaids

by Karen Finell

Overview

Good-bye to the Mermaids conveys the horrors of World War II as seen through the innocent eyes of a child. It tells of a convoluted world where children were torn between fear and hope, between total incomprehension of events and the need to simply deal with reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826265463
Publisher:	University of Missouri Press
Publication date:	10/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Karin Finell left Berlin in 1952 and now lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Editorial Reviews

At the opening of this rich, descriptive memoir of WWII Berlin, Finell writes of the mermaids whose souls, according to legend, are the foam of the ocean she loved. Thus, the title evokes the childhood that was lost to the war, and equally the childlike desire to believe, as the author did, in what Hitler was selling. Most of Finell's family failed to share her belief her divorced mother, an artist, did not, and her half-Jewish relatives certainly did not. Finell, who was six when the war began, lived through many of the quintessential German wartime situations. She participated in the Hitler Youth and fled her home during the bombing campaign, but much of this territory has been mined by previous writers (like Irmgard Hunt in On Hitler's Mountain). More compelling here are Finell's descriptions of the war's end and the immediate postwar years, as she deftly depicts the chaos, poverty and hope that coexisted. She also shows how the truth about the Nazis and their actions slowly seeped into her consciousness. This gracefully written memoir adds to our growing understanding of the German experience of the war. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly