Joseph W. Michels

Villa Marckwald Joseph W. Michels

VILLA MARCKWALD is a love story set in the immediate aftermath of the unification of East and West Germany. Alice Marckwald and Adam Bell, both fifty-eight and born in Berlin, meet under adversarial conditions arising from counter restitution claims for the return of an architecturally significant urban mansion in the heart of Berlin. Alice, a widow with two grown daughters, was born in the mansion but remembers it only as a child. The Nazis had forced her Jewish family to sell the residence in the 1930's. Adam, whose "Aryan" family purchased the mansion, grew up there and was in his early twenties at the time the building was seized by the communist regime in the 1950's. Both found their way to America. Alice works as a mathematician in Santa Monica, California, and Adam is a professor of archaeology at a small college in central Pennsylvania. Both, for their own reasons, greet news of the possibility of recovering the mansion as a welcome development in their respective lives and file the necessary papers seeking its return. The shock to each after being informed the other has filed a competing claim strengthens their resolve. Eventually, they meet face to face where their initial animosity is slowly worn away as they come to know one another. A week-long sojourn on the island of Sardinia brings their relationship to a new level and poses a dilemma that each must resolve if a satisfactory outcome is to be achieved.