Elisabeth Haggblade’s memoir Trauterose, which won the 2024 IndieReader Discovery Award in the Memoir category and First Place Non-Fiction in The Authors Show 2024 Book Cover Awards, provides a rare first-person testimony of life in post-World War II Germany. Orphaned at birth during the war, Haggblade spent her first eleven years in the household of a former SS officer and his family. Her account focuses on the often-overlooked human dimension of Germany’s postwar crisis, a period marked by political fragmentation, economic collapse, and profound social upheaval.
While countless accounts explore Germany’s wartime experience, far fewer capture the daily realities and psychological toll of the years that followed. Haggblade’s narrative fills that gap by detailing the struggles of ordinary survival: finding soap, comb, toothbrush, and warm water; securing food and ways to cook it; attending school without public or private transportation in all seasons; finding proper clothes and shoes; and coping with sickness and death in the family. “One had to make an effort to establish a routine, to bring some kind of order into one’s life,” Haggblade said in a recent talk for AAUW book club members in Santa Barbara, CA. “All the while, people still had to suffer the usual annoying indignities of adolescence, middle age crises, old age problems.”
Haggblade wrote the book as a corrective to what she saw as incomplete portrayals. “I wrote this book as a reaction to reports and pictures of that time that I saw: Glamorous portrayals in German magazines of the postwar years,” she stated. “More importantly, I wanted to respond to positive comments I kept hearing from Americans about their understanding of the postwar years. Both impressions were in contrast to my experience growing up and those I came in contact with. They told only one side of the story.” She added, “On a personal level, I wanted to bring the reader into the picture: How life had to go on, war or no war. I let the rooms and the furniture be witnesses to our family’s daily struggle.”
The memoir also touches on the role of faith and community in enduring hardship. Haggblade recounts the influence of the late Pope Benedict XVI, then known as Herr Joseph Ratzinger, who taught her catechism in fourth grade in the 1950s. After he left her school, he wrote a handwritten letter advising, “If one buttons one’s coat the wrong way, one would have to undo all of it and start over again to make it right. So it is with life,” admonishing students “to choose the right beginning.”
Reviewers have praised Trauterose for its unflinching honesty and historical value. Craig Jones of IndieReader called it “an uncompromising, moving, and elegiac memoir of a deprived childhood in postwar Germany.” Midwest Book Review noted that “libraries seeking powerful, personal memoirs that hold political and social lessons and insights will find Trauterose a study in adaptation, survival, and growth.” One Amazon reviewer wrote, “It offers an unforgettable window into a time and place that few Americans know about.”
The book is available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Elisabeth-Haggblade/author/B0CTRXLF9G. More information is available at her website at https://www.trauteroseauthor.com. Haggblade’s account serves as a cautionary tale on the inherited guilt created by rampant nationalism, and a painfully honest and often humorous view of the world through the eyes of a young woman who found her way to freedom and purpose.
