Anna Dahlberg grew up eating dinner under her father’s war-trophy portrait of Eva Braun.
Fifty years after the war, she discovers what he never did—that her mother and Hitler’s mistress were friends.
The secret surfaces with a mysterious monogrammed handkerchief, and a man, Hannes Ritter, whose Third Reich family history is entwined with Anna’s.
Plunged into the world of the “ordinary” Munich girl who was her mother’s confidante—and a tyrant’s lover—Anna finds her every belief about right and wrong challenged. With Hannes’s help, she retraces the path of two women who met as teenagers, shared a friendship that spanned the years that Eva Braun was Hitler’s mistress, yet never knew that the men they loved had opposing ambitions.
Eva’s story reveals that she never joined the Nazi party, had Jewish friends, and was credited at the Nuremberg Trials with saving 35,000 Allied lives. As Anna’s journey leads back through the treacherous years in wartime Germany, it uncovers long-buried secrets and unknown reaches of her heart to reveal the enduring power of love in the legacies that always outlast war.
Meet Phyllis Edgerly Ring
Phyllis Edgerly Ring’s novel, The Munich Girl: A Novel of the Legacies
That Outlast War, explores the enduring effects of a woman’s secret
friendship with Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. Phyllis is also the author
of the novel, Snow Fence Road, and of the nonfiction works, Life at
First Sight: Finding the Divine in the Details and With Thine Own Eyes:
Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality? She studied plant
sciences and ecology, worked as a nurse, taught English to
kindergartners in China, coordinated programs at a Baha’i conference
center, and returns as often as she can to her childhood home of
Germany.
