Loving The Enemy

About the Book

This story covers the years 1935 - 1950 and documents the relationship of an Englishwoman and an Austrian ten years her junior beginning with a holiday romance in the Austrian Alps in 1935. However this is no romance in the accepted snese but carried on through extensive correspondence and finally separated by war. Karl, an underpaid research chemist and part-time mountaineer and part-time ski instructor, intelligent and desperate to acquire a universtiy education looks to Germany and sees both the Anschluss and Hitler as a way to his own and his Country's salvation. His politicisation is a personal reflection of a turbulent society still smarting from the defeats of war and the perceived injustice of the Versailles Treaty.

This is set in contrast to Ellen's social ambitions having re-invented herself, turning her back on her working class origins, elevating herself through elocution lessons and passing her civil service entrance exams and of her aspirations to join the English middle class. But also her naivety of the political situation in Europe and of Karls attempts at persuasion.

The romance blossoming largely through letters and all too infrequent visits and finally separation through war and for Karl the final realization of the reality of the evils of Nazism and personally the brutality of the Gestapo. This is a story of survival against the odds and ends finally in 1950; but perhaps rather differently than that prescribed for romantic fiction.

About the Author

Nancy Harris was born in 1932 in Northampton, married at the age of 20 and has four adult children. After her children had left home she realized her lifetime ambition to study English and Literature and became a mature full-time university student. Since then she has written many short stories and poems and one full length biography.

She died in August 2006 from a brain tumor before she was able to see this work in print.