CLARA'S SECRET

In this debut work of history, Frenkel explores a great European city through the collected photographs of his grandmother.

Clara Prinz came of age in La Belle Époque, the Beautiful Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of peace during which the great cities of Europe buzzed with prosperity, innovation, and optimism for human society. Clara’s native Berlin was perhaps the grandest city of them all, the capital of an ascendant Kingdom of Prussia and a hub of modern ideas. Clara’s active life in the city and her memories of these times—documented in letters and postcards—captured Berlin at the height of its grandeur. “She preserved them in an album of autographed photographs,” writes the author, “featuring talented personalities who became the finest representatives of the era as they visited, lived and thrived in Berlin.” These luminaries include Mark Twain, Isadora Duncan, Richard Strauss, and Theodore Roosevelt. Using these postcards and photographs as his jumping-off point, Frenkel—the grandson of Clara, who came across her album during his genealogical research—tells the story of this lost epoch, which ended calamitously with the outbreak of the First World War. He vividly captures the story of old Berlin, a city that the Jewish Clara fled with her family in 1939 and which was almost completely destroyed by the bombs of World War II. The depth of the author’s research allows him to cover broad swaths of history while also re-creating specific scenes from Clara’s life with novelistic flair. Clara witnesses the great tenor Enrico Caruso singing to the students gathered outside his dressing room window: “To the astonishment of his faithful valet, Caruso raised his arms and began to sing the aria from the Friedrich von Flotow opera Martha. Suddenly, the crowd fell into silence to listen to the beautiful voice they had come to hear.” Re-creating the city through the eyes of a family that would one day have to flee from it adds an extra layer of poignancy to the work.

A tender, personality-centered biography of golden age Berlin.