Heartstrings

Heartstrings: A Tale of Danish Loyalty, Resistance, and Homecoming is about the ties that bind us to our families, our social institutions, and our country of birth. It is a story of a region and its people at a particularly challenging time in history as well as a piece of immigrant literature, written from the double perspective of those who left and those who stayed behind. The author's grandmother is the central character of the story and serves as a representative of those who made the difficult choice of remaining in Southern Jutland, Denmark, during the years of Prussian annexation from 1864 to 1920. Many emigrated to America, and, based on their letters home, Wiehl imagines her grandmother making comparisons between the lives of those who stayed and those who left, pondering choices and consequences. Her grandmother is furthermore emblematic of the women who ran their farms during WWI when husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, good Danes all -- against their will and hearts' desires -- had been conscripted into the Prussian army. Many died, among them the author's grandfather, many were lost to emigration, and many emigrants never saw their homeland again. Even so, Heartstrings is a story of homecoming, geographically and metaphorically, and the powers of heart and will that make homecoming possible.