Excerpt from The Correspondents by Judith Mackrell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I probably missed out on a lot of fun," she acknowledged. But she had no intention of sacrificing her own ambitions and, having graduated from the lycée with high honours, she not only began professional singing lessons, but was enrolled at the Sorbonne for courses in history and international law. Already, she was displaying the stubborn application that would drive her reporting career, and, even though she'd inherited Herman's weak chest and had to be admitted to a Lucerne sanatorium with possible TB, she remained open to new horizons. When her parents wrote with news that they were temporarily setting up a home and studio in Berlin for Herman's work, she was eager to join them as soon as she was well.

Berlin seemed full of possibilities when Sigrid arrived: it had a fine university and "it was the place" to study singing, if she could only scrape together the funds.10 Yet it didn't take her long to become aware of an unsettling edge to the city. The newspapers she read were strident with xenophobic editorials, calling for the Kaiser to defend Germany against the expansionist greed of its European rivals; meanwhile, her parents' Jewish friends spoke of an alarming surge of anti-Semitic feeling in the city, their businesses boycotted and hate mail sent to their homes. Even though the Schultzes themselves had made little of Hedwig's ancestry (it's not even clear when Sigrid was told that she herself was half-Jewish), the family could not ignore these signs and could not but feel that Berlin in early 1914 was a potentially hostile city.

Sigrid's own response to these uncertain times was typically self-denying and typically practical. It was obvious that she and her parents needed a reliable source of income, so, abandoning her own studies, she gained a rudimentary teaching certificate and advertised for work as a private language tutor. Herman, who'd had such fine plans for his daughter, was grandly and unreasonably disappointed in her, yet, by 3 August, he had to acknowledge Sigrid's prescience. The Serbian bullet that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand had sparked a dramatic unravelling of the already fragile European peace, and the Central Powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were now at war with Russia, France and Britain.

Initially, the war made little impact on the Schultzes. They trusted that their dual American and Norwegian citizenship would keep them safe (both countries were still neutral at this point); Herman was earning unexpectedly good money from high-ranking Germans who wanted to be painted in their uniforms; and Sigrid was particularly buoyant because a Norwegian-American naval officer, whom she'd known for several years, had proposed to her while on leave in Berlin. Guarded as she later was about the details of her private life, she didn't identify her fiancé by name, but she did imply that he'd been the love of her young life, that he'd helped to overcome her fears of marriage and that she'd hoped to become his wife as soon as the war was over.

Two and a half years and several million casualties later, however, the war showed no signs of ending, and, in April 1917, when America joined forces with Allied powers, Sigrid's own situation became extremely grave.

Like all American citizens, she and her parents had been encouraged to leave Germany, yet their departure had been delayed because Herman had been offered a last-minute and very lucrative commission in Hamburg. His decision to accept would then prove fateful for the whole family because, once there, he was diagnosed with TB and placed under strict quarantine, which left Sigrid and Hedwig stranded in Berlin, not only scared about Herman's health, but, even more frighteningly, re-categorized as enemy aliens, required to report twice a day to the police and to remain confined to their immediate neighbourhood.

Life for Sigrid now shrank to a series of small survival strategies, as she dodged the military police to teach her few remaining pupils and bred rabbits on the apartment balcony, bartering them for flour at a local bakery. Then, in the summer of 1917, she heard that her fiancé had been lost at sea, his ship almost certainly torpedoed by German U-boats. At that moment, she all but buckled under the weight of despair. "I thought [it] was the end of my emotional life," she recalled.11 Yet her parents still needed her support, and, in the autumn of 1917, when she learned that the mayor of Baghdad was in Berlin and was looking for an interpreter who was fluent in English, German and French, Sigrid forced herself to rise above her misery and apply for the post.

Excerpted from The Correspondents by Judith Mackrell. Copyright © 2021 by Judith Mackrell. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.