As the Twig Is Bent

About the Book

This memoir takes the reader through the teen years of an American girl forced to live with her divorced mother and grandparents in Nazi Germany beginning at age 12 in 1932 and ending when Hitler attacked Poland in 1939. She became the lone American in a girls school in Frankfurt-am-Main, initially speaking no German. She gradually becomes fluent in the strange language and is absorbed into the student body. She acquaints the reader with her girl friends in school, and later with her boy friends. She tells how students in her school were propagandized by the Hitler government in every facet of their academic studies. She describes her personal exposures to the methods the state used to influence the young minds of the German youth: the marching songs, the Nazification of all studies, the ubiquitous greeting of “Heil Hitler, ” the glorification of all things German with the corresponding denigration of all things non-German--especially Jewish. Hence the quotation from Pope that gives the book its title: “Education’s for the common mind--As the twig is bent, so the tree’s inclined.”

About the Author

This memoir takes the reader through the teen years of an American girl forced to live with her divorced mother and grandparents in Nazi Germany beginning at age 12 in 1932 and ending when Hitler attacked Poland in 1939. She became the lone American in a girls school in Frankfurt-am-Main, initially speaking no German. She gradually becomes fluent in the strange language and is absorbed into the student body. She acquaints the reader with her girl friends in school, and later with her boy friends. She tells how students in her school were propagandized by the Hitler government in every facet of their academic studies. She describes her personal exposures to the methods the state used to influence the young minds of the German youth: the marching songs, the Nazification of all studies, the ubiquitous greeting of “Heil Hitler, ” the glorification of all things German with the corresponding denigration of all things non-German--especially Jewish. Hence the quotation from Pope that gives the book its title: “Education’s for the common mind--As the twig is bent, so the tree’s inclined.”