"Du bist nicht so wie andre Mütter"

Du bist nicht so wie andre Mütter is the most famous work of Angelika Schrobsdorff and a strongly autobiographically intoned novel based on the life of her mother Elsa Kirschner, a peculiar woman from Berlin's civic and artistic milieu. Else is beautiful, charismatic, impulsive and completely different from the image of the "exemplary" mother of her time - she loves intensely, lives by her own rules and refuses to conform to social expectations.

Through her life, the novel brings to life Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, the world of the Jewish middle class, bohemian circles, love affairs, family breakdowns and the gradual encroachment of political disaster. It is precisely in this combination of the private and the historical that the uniqueness of the book lies: the story of the mother is not idealized, but shown with all the contradictions - passion, vanity, courage, vulnerability and selfishness. That is why Else is simultaneously fascinating and difficult, close and unfathomable.

The novel gains additional strength from the fact that the author writes about her own family, so the text has the emotional density of a memoir, but also the breadth of a historical novel. It is not only a story about a mother, but also about Jewish identity, women's freedom, assimilation, love and the disintegration of a world under the pressure of Nazism. Due to its expressive style and striking central figure, the book is considered an important work of German autobiographical and family literature.