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

Her new job was to have a transformative effect on her world. Réouf Bey Chadirchi was rich, aristocratic and clever, and while he'd come to Berlin on diplomatic business, he was planning to supplement his own private law studies at the city's university, and was expecting Sigrid to assist him in lectures as well as in meetings. After three years of anxious, menial work, it was thrilling to feel her brain re-engaged: "Can you imagine," she wrote, "the joy of continuing studies that seemed all important to me, and being paid for that privilege." But so intimately did Réouf come to depend on Sigrid, for her intelligence as well as her interpreting skills, that he began to entrust her with some of his more politically tricky affairs.12

If there was a moment when Sigrid first got her taste for investigative journalism, it may have been the confrontation she engineered with Réouf's most formidable adversary, the right-wing nationalist and anti-Semite, General Ludendorff. Ludendorff had come up with a plan to scapegoat the nation's Jewish community for Germany's failing performance in the war and he was pressuring Réouf to drum up support for his scheme among the Arab states. Réouf had been repelled by the idea, but his position in Berlin was delicate and he was ready to accept Sigrid's proposal that she interrogate Ludendorff further, on his behalf.

Later she would admit that her strategy for questioning the general was intrepid, but naive; for, while she'd provided herself with cigarettes and canned sardines to bribe her way up to Ludendorff's hotel suite, she had no way of compelling him to listen and, as she recalled, "an onlooker would have been amused to see me firing questions at the stony faced general while he tried to walk away as fast as possible without actually breaking into a trot."13 Yet, even though Sigrid failed to assist Réouf in his dilemma, he was captivated by the courage she'd shown, and in November 1918, when the war ended and he was recalled to Baghdad, he asked her to accompany him as his wife.

"Our relations, which were indifferent at the beginning, became more and more intimate, you supported and advised me in every way," Réouf fondly reminded Sigrid when he wrote to her fourteen years later.14 But, while she cared for Réouf, she had no interest in marrying him, not least because she was still in mourning for her fiancé and would continue to be so for "years and years."15 Nevertheless, Réouf's departure would leave an emotional as well as a financial void in Sigrid's life, and she would feel his absence even more keenly when Germany's defeat in the war was followed by months of revolutionary chaos.

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.