Karen Schutte: 5 books

GERMAN YANKEE is based on the lives of Karen’s paternal great grandparents, John and Elizabeth Westerhoff. John Westerhoff left Hamburg Germany in 1858 to avoid further service in the Prussian cavalry. He arrived in the predominately German settlement of Warsaw, Illinois, just as civil unrest was...

1943: 18-year old Arnold Kessel and the 5th Division/81st Tank Battalion hit the beach at Normandy. In two days he’s baptized by fire as Patton/Hodges race through France to trap 100,000 Germans in the Falaise Gap. Surviving the Hurtgen Forest & Battle of the Bulge, Arnold arrives on the banks...

Destined to a life of servitude, Karl Kessel, a turn-of-the-century German immigrant from a Danube Swabian settlement in Surtschin, Yugoslavia receives an unexpected gift of The Ticket, to America. Grasping his dream he leaves behind his young wife, Katja and two small sons. Karl boards the KronPrinz...

Ask most people to imagine a philosopher and they probably think of someone like Socrates—absent-minded, perhaps, but with a sharp intellect and a thirst for the truth. A woman juggling car pools and housework is not the first image that springs to mind, but women have taken huge steps in the philosophy...

The second book of a trilogy, SEED OF THE VOLGA encompasses the lives of the author's great-grandparents. Beginning in Germany, 1861 the Steiner family is traced from an unwed and pregnant princess in the Black Forest, to the banks of Russia's Volga River. The reader is gripped by the dire dilemma of...