Author, screenwriter and a culture editor for the national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Johanna Adorjan guest blogs for Readings to tell us the story behind An Exclusive Love - her memoir/love story about her Hungarian-Jewish grandparents.

When my grandparents took their own lives in 1991, I was twenty years old, studying theatre-directing in Munich and had no idea what would become of me (theatre director somehow didn’t seem like an option). My grandfather had been very ill, the doctors had given him only a few months to live – and my grandmother, a proud, imperious, beautiful woman whom I have difficulty imagining without a cigarette between her fingers, had announced that she would not want to live on without him. She had mentioned to someone, my mother, my aunt, that she and my grandfather wanted to kill themselves together, so we knew of this intention, had heard the idea – but when they did it, it was a shock.

They were found hand in hand in their marriage bed.

They were buried next to each other. One funeral, two coffins.

We inherited their dog, a stubborn Irish terrier named Mitzi, who knew only Hungarian, the language my grandparents had spoken all their life together. They were Jews from Budapest, survived the Holocaust, fled to Denmark in 1956 and at some point in their uncertain lives must have taken the decision never to let go of the other again. For 16 years I found myself nearly speechless every time I told anyone about my Hungarian/Danish grandparents. The thought of their death filled me with a vague and somewhat threatening sadness. How do you wake up in the morning, knowing this is your last? In what mood do you go for the last walk with the dog? How do you end the day and with it your life?

Eventually, I sat down and tried to imagine all of this as accurately as possible. This is how An Exclusive Love came about. It tells the story of Vera and István, an elegant and eccentric couple that the twentieth century with all its horrors was not able to separate. They had the last word.

An Exclusive Love is out now. Read the Readings review here.

Author image: Peter von Felbert