A Memoir · By Elisabeth Hitz
The Hitz Inheritance is written by the granddaughter of the missing heiress. It follows two investigations at once: the one the newspapers ran in 1965, and the one the author began as an oral history project at New York University and turned into a decade-long family investigation, working from the archive her family kept across three continents. The manuscript is written and in final edit.
From The Opening Pages
Such was the case for Anna Maria Hitz in September of 1964. She was sixteen, all but bursting out of her stylishly tight-fitted suits, wearing the stiff fashions of the decade like a costume that did not fit her spirit.
It was a rainy September night when she went with her mother to a party at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany. … It began with the fated arrival of a strikingly handsome man: Ulrich Bierschenk, the embassy’s night watchman.
That, at least, is one way to explain it. Because at first, no one could explain it at all, when Anna Maria simply vanished.
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The Author
Elisabeth Hitz is Anna Maria's granddaughter. She grew up inside the story, in the languages it happened in: she works in English, Spanish, German, French and Italian, the four languages of the archive and one more. The project began as an oral history during her undergraduate years at New York University, and she has spent the years since assembling what the family kept: the clippings, the court papers, the letters, the photographs.
She is the sole rights holder. Every fact in the book traces to a document in the archive or to the people who lived it.
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