The Story of My Life — Volume 01
The Story of My Life — Volume 01
Translated by Mary J. (Mary Joanna) Safford
Georg Ebers opens the door to 1830s and 1840s Berlin in this intimate autobiographical volume, inviting readers into a world of gaslit streets, intellectual salons, and a boyhood spent between dusty bookshops and the banks of the Spree. The future author of "An Egyptian Princess" traces his formation as a scholar and storyteller through the people who shaped him: his formidable mother, whose love of literature became his inheritance; his schoolmasters, who stirred his fascination with ancient worlds; and the household rhythms that sheltered him through grief, including the devastating loss of his father. Ebers writes with the same romantic warmth that made his historical novels beloved across Europe, finding poetry in a child's wonder at a fireworks display no less than in a teenager's first encounter with Homer. This volume captures the making of a literary mind against the backdrop of a Germany trembling on the edge of revolution. For readers who cherish the 19th-century memoir tradition, it offers something rare: the portrait of a great storyteller discovering his own voice.
