Title Details

"No interviews about my private life" has always been Henry Kissinger's response to curious journalists. But journalist Evi Kurz from Furth, the Kissingers' hometown in southern Germany, proposed a family portrait and eventually managed to win the trust of both brothers. This is the story of two Americans of German-Jewish descent: one of them a key figure in Cold War diplomacy and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the other a top businessman—two lives which are exemplars of the American dream. When Louis and Paula Kissinger's sons were born in 1923 and 1924, the Kissingers were part of a flourishing Jewish middle class in Furth, a large market town in northern Bavaria. But then Hitler came to power. Evi Kurz describes the gradual but remorseless destruction of Furth's Jewish community in the 1930s; the Kissinger family's emotional farewell to Germany in 1938 and their escape to New York; the family's war years in America; and the hugely successful careers in postwar America of both brothers, who nevertheless remembered and cherished their German home and roots.