READING CLAUDIUS

Caroline Heller’s memoir –10 years in the making -- of the lives of her parents, her uncle and their circle of intellectuals and dreamers in Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, through to the present day.
(The titular Claudius is the German poet Matthias Claudius, whom her father favoured over Robert Frost.)

We follow Caroline’s mother Liese, as she arrives in Prague as a young German medical student in 1933. Liese soon meets the Heller brothers, and is swept up into their world—the pre-war European literary mileu of cafes and lively intellectual discussion that later became irrevocably destroyed by the war. Through the nightmarish years of Hitler, Heller's parents and uncle, and their circle of friends, turned time and time again to literature in order to survive. Initially drawn to the older of the brothers—charismatic and intellectual Erich, who would later on become a notable essayist and scholar of German philosophy and literature —Liese embarks on a relationship with him even though it is quiet, younger Paul who holds a torch for her. It is only after the war, and having survived years of suffering in Buchenwald, that Paul reunites with Liese in post-war New York City.

Heller’s narrative takes readers through the harrowing years of the war, and follows her family as they and their circle made their way—to varying degrees of success—to foreign shores, eventually settling in Riverside, Illinois. Throughout, European literature formed a large part of the inheritance Paul Heller left his children, and READING CLAUDIUS is filled with allusions to the continent’s rich literary tradition. This memoir is a loving homage to books and writers, and to an era now long since lost. (The titular Claudius is the German poet Matthias Claudius, whom her father favoured over Robert Frost.)

Professor Caroline E. Heller teaches in the PhD program at Lesley University, in Massachussetts. She has a BA from the University of Chicago, a MFA from Bennington College, and obtained her EdD from the University of California at Berkeley. In the course of her research for READING CLAUDIUS, she travelled to Frankfurt, Prague, and Cambridge, England.