num_pages: 332
description: This riveting love story revolving around two extraordinary individuals plays out against some of the most profound markers of the 20th Hitler's Germany the American immigrant experience and growing threats of the nuclear age. Hermann Hoerlin and Kate Tietz Schmid meet in 1934; he a handsome world record-holding mountaineer and aspiring physicist is a staunch anti-fascist and she part of Munich's intellectual and musical elite is a stunning widow whose husband was murdered by the Nazis. To have a future together Hoerlin (as she called him) and Kate must flee Germany. Standing in their way is a major obstacle the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting relationships between Aryans and Jews. Against formidable odds and with the direct assistance of a few 'good' Nazis Kate and Hoerlin manage to marry and immigrate to the United States. However as enemy aliens during World War II they face new adversities. Life finally returns to normal with the help of influential friends including a connection with Eleanor Roosevelt. And in a strange twist Hoerlin contributes to the war effort with his extensive European mountaineering maps that help guide Allied reconnaissance missions. In 1953 Hoerlin and Kate pull up stakes again moving to the Atomic City of Los Alamos where Hoerlin works at the forefront of the first nuclear test ban treaty. Again he is brought under scrutiny this time because of McCarthyism and Hoerlin's links with the American left-wing. The book spans an era from the rise of Nazism when a diabolic dictator sets out to annihilate Jews to the depths of the Cold War when weapons of mass destruction threaten to annihilate humankind. In their remarkable odyssey Kate and Hoerlin befriend cultural and scientific icons such as the philosopher Oswald Spengler cellist Pablo Casals conductor Wilhelm Furtwangeler painter Georgia O'Keefe and Nobel prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe.
language: English
title: Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America
publisher: AuthorHouse