In the early 1900s, in a German village on
the North Sea,
a man named Wilhelm Schoon mistakenly thought he'd killed someone
in a bar fight.
Nervous, he slipped over the Dutch border and emigrated to Iowa,
"where you can just spit on the ground and the corn grows three meters
high!"
Thirty years later his three granddaughters
back in Germany inherited his land in America.
One chose to emigrate; the other
two stayed behind.
Wanderlust chronicles the repercussions of their choices.
The daughter of a midwife recalls her
childhood during WWII
as her home is attacked by fellow Germans.
A nine-year-old boy watches his father learn the art of farming in "Amerika."
An American woman follows her German
husband back to Europe
and for the first time views the U.S. through foreign
eyes.
A young man in East Germany devotes his
life to the study of the violin,
secretly hoping to gain a place in a touring
orchestra
so that he will have the chance to defect,
but as the Berlin Wall
falls he finds he must reevaluate his life and his ambitions.
Wanderlust is both a memoir and a
travelogue,
a story of work, family, love, and immigration.