Auf Wiedersehen

About the Book

As a student in the late 1960s, Jack Mannheim was arrested twice: once for taking over an administration building, and once for a reason he won’t share. In the thirty years since, he has lived a quiet life in Chicago as a German professor with his physician wife, Bea. But Jack’s inexplicable passion for his student, Ellie, awakens feelings with which he has never dealt. His angry, self-destructive daughter Jessie seems to reincarnate the woman who devastated him in his student days. Despite Jack’s German origins, he has never come to terms with the atrocities committed by the culture he loves. As Jack’s family life threatens to collapse, he struggles to face the feelings he has denied. Auf Wiedersehen follows a wounded man’s effort to accept his losses and affirm his life.

About the Author

Laura Otis is a professor of English at Emory University. She holds a BS in biochemistry, an MA in neuroscience, a PhD in comparative literature, and an MFA in fiction. She is the author of six academic books and the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, and Lacking in Substance. In 2000, she received a MacArthur Fellowship for creativity.