German Awakening: Tales from an American Life

A small-town teacher’s kid, little sister of a genius, Amy Hallberg dreamed of escape by way of a West German exchange in 1987. The resulting friendship with her exchange sister, Eva, awakened a lifelong quest to understand all things German. Back home in Minnesota, Hallberg embarked on a German literature major just as the Berlin Wall fell.

As Frau Hallberg, high school teacher, she hoped to impart vital knowledge (in a language she’d never mastered, on a country where she’d never truly lived). She soon discovered the most profound lessons were notes to self, delivered not in German, but in her own mother tongue.