Not Hitler's Child

Not Hitler's Child traces the long, eventful arc of Christa-Maria Beardsley's life - from her childhood in Nazi Germany, where the war forced her family into a life of almost continual displacement, to her immigration to the United States and her two-decade tenure as a professor of German at Indiana University, a career marked by the author's pioneering efforts in the development of study-abroad programs, and finally to her artistically active retirement, during which she played a prominent and passionate role in the classical-music community of Bloomington, Indiana. Ms. Beardsley's guiding concerns - a commitment to education and the arts, an abiding curiosity about the vagaries of human relationships, and an ever-deepening sensitivity to music and the natural world - form the bass line of her life story. By turns celebratory and sorrowful, reflective and humorous, Not Hitler's Child is the record of both a life of the mind and a life fully lived.