Annegret Ogden – Made in Germany • September 29, 2013

Annegret Ogden experienced VE-Day as a child in Germany. At the University in Munich, she met her American husband, a fellow student, and accompanied him to Berkeley, CA. Now retired from her work as a librarian at the University of California, she has written for The Californians, and is the author of The Great American Housewife. She was a founder of The Kensington Ladies’ Erotica Society and her stories have appeared in their three books: Ladies’ Own Erotica; Look Homeward, Erotica; and, Sex, Death and Other Distractions.

Praise for Made in Germany

Annegret Ogden’s bravely provocative novel shows us what life may have been like as an “Aryan” child in Nazi Germany, then as a wife and mother in Berkeley in the 1960’s – one of several settings where personal and complex echoes of the Holocaust follow her adult heroine. ~Alison Owings, author of Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich

From Germany’s Third Reich to Berkeley’s counter-culture, this fascinating family saga explores intricate entanglements between a German woman and Jewish one, between their secrets, and among their children. Read the first line and you know you’re in for a gripping story. ~ Mary Felstiner, historian and author of To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era.

Along with one of the all-time grabbers of an opening scene, Ogden gives readers both valuable social history and a rollicking story. Straight from post-War Germany, with survival skills acquired during a childhood under Hitler, her narrator Brigitte becomes a faculty wife at UC Berkeley. Her eventful and often funny trajectory over thirty years is a look back at the social upheaval of those times. ~ Cyra McFadden, author of The Serial and Rain or Shine

If you would like to view our archive video of the presentation, contact Dr. Marion Gerlind for access.