A Legacy
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford depicts their vastly different worlds - the wealthy bourgeois life of the Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation, their personal upheavals and tragedies are set against the menacing backdrop of a newly unified Germany combined with Prussian militarism in the decades before the First World War.
Includes an introduction by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bedford's historical account, in which two very different families are bound together by marriage, money, and tragedy in the time just before WWI, parallels her own early life. In a recently unified Germany on the brink of war, familial struggles reflect the country's precarious foundation. When Julius von Felden, a well-off man of Catholic descent with more cachet in his cultural pursuits than money to his name, meets and marries Melanie Merz, a young Jewish woman from an affluent family, their union produces a daughter and causes tension. Although their time together is short-lived Melanie succumbs to illness, leaving behind Julius and their daughter Julius continues to receive an allowance from the Merz family. The Feldens, French-speaking Catholic aristocrats from the south of Germany, live a rich and rural life in the country. When Johannes, one of Julius's three brothers, is shipped off to a Prussian cadet camp and runs away, causing scandal within the family, the catastrophic results are felt for years. Then a tragic accident exposes secrets and motives, causing an irreparable rift between the families. Fraught with Prussian politics and heavy-handed historical context, this is less a bildungsroman than a tale of a family adjusting to a changing country. Bedford's cool, insightful narrative style leaves her characters flat and unchanging in the face of great historical change.