Excerpt from Cradles of the Reich by Jennifer Coburn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Then take her to a doctor." Irma reached to close the door, already thinking of her dinner with Eduard. She had planned to surprise him by arriving at his house a half hour early, before his children showed up. After months of dallying, he had agreed to finally set a wedding date, and tonight Irma would hold him to it. There was no way Charlotte's clumsiness was going to delay her plans.

Irma hesitated for a moment. Ava's lips quivered with fear, but this was not Irma's problem, was it? Shifting the weight from her heel to her toe, Ava's fingers tapped the sides of her skirt. Just witnessing her housemate's anxiety exhausted Irma.

Ava pressed, her voice high with urgency. "Charlotte says you were a nurse in the Great War."

"I haven't practiced in more than twenty years, and I'm certainly not going to start by stitching up someone's finger," Irma snapped. "Wrap it up, apply pressure to stop the bleeding, and get the girl to a doctor."

Ava's forehead lined with worry. "Please, Irma, can't you go with her? She says you'll know what to do. She will be more comfortable with you there at the hospital with her."

With Ava's last plea, Irma lifted her hands in surrender and closed her eyes. "All right, fine. Wait for me in the kitchen, and I'll be downstairs in a moment."

Ava thanked Irma before running down the main staircase. When Ava was out of sight, Irma turned toward the back of the house to make her escape. Charlotte could figure out how to get a finger stitched without Irma's help. She reached the landing of the back staircase and removed her shoes, walking gingerly down the bare wooden steps and slipping out the servant's entrance. If she walked quickly, she could probably make it to Römerberg Square before anyone realized she'd left. Soon enough, she would be married to Eduard and finished with these frivolous girls.

More comfortable! This generation is spoiled to think they deserve comfort. Live through a war. Lose your loved ones. Then come talk to me about how you need someone to hold your hand through a simple medical visit. Irma slipped her feet back into her shoes and closed the door quietly behind her.

Rounding the narrow corner onto Braubachstrasse heading toward the Main River, Irma began to feel a twinge of regret before steeling herself again. Silently, she muttered, It's Ava and Charlotte who should feel guilty for bothering me with this nonsense.

* * *

It had been more than two decades since Irma had seen the inside of a hospital, and she wanted to keep it that way. She had felt this way since the day she left her ward at Potsdam Military Hospital when the war ended. When she had packed her footlocker to return home to Frankfurt, Irma left behind her nurse's uniform, telling her supervisor, Marianne, that she wanted no reminder of the war. She soon realized it wasn't that simple.

Irma still regularly woke herself, gasping, in the middle of the nightmare she always had. It was about Karl, a soldier she'd cared for toward the end of the war, who had survived a lower leg amputation but died weeks later of a staph infection while Irma held his hand and he called her Mami. But in her dream, Karl was furious at Irma, blaming her for his death. He pulled her toward the hospital bed, which transformed into a murky lake. Soon, she was submerged, Karl's grip tight on her wrists as she fought her way to the surface. Irma always woke gulping for air.

Although she admitted this to no one, her night terrors once drove her to a psychiatrist, who advised her to imagine her wartime memories as articles of filthy and torn clothing she no longer needed. During their session, she was instructed to imagine picking the items off her messy bedroom floor and throwing them into a garbage pail. The exercise wasn't particularly helpful, because Irma kept thinking how wasteful it was to dispose of clothing that could be put to good use. At the very least, they could be used as cleaning rags. Young doctors were never particularly adept at seeing the world through the lenses of their older patients. Maybe this was true of young people in general, especially those lucky enough to have no real memory of the lean Weimar years.

* * *

When Irma reached Römerberg Square, she stopped at the Fountain of Justice for a moment and remembered the night Helmut, her Gymnasium sweetheart, had proposed. She was so young, just nineteen years old. Now, Irma could barely fathom that she had once been filled with such naïve dreams. How arrogant she and Helmut had been, thinking that they could plan for a future in such an uncertain world, where the kaiser acted like a little boy constantly poking at a hornet's nest.

Excerpted from Cradles of the Reich by Jennifer Coburn. Copyright © 2022 by Jennifer Coburn. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.