Ventana

Infatuated with the image of a Native American Indian man, a native German returns to the place where she first encountered her vision of living male perfection. Accompanied by an American friend, she travels through geographically and emotionally unfamiliar territory when she revisits Ventana, a place of Indian lore in the barrenness of rural southern New Mexico. The story takes us from childhood memories of Soviet occupied East Germany to her gripping escape to West Germany and a life-changing chance encounter at Ventana. On her way, she meets people from different cultures and first closes them out but then learns to accept the differences that separate them and to embrace the commonalities they share. Her humorous, heart-wrenching and spine-tingling adventures take us on a journey through time and countries as well as on a roller-coaster ride inside the broadening mind of a person who learns to overcome her challenges and, in the end, finds what she didn't know she had lost - herself. Ventana is a story of friendship and courage, emotional highs and lows, opportunities to effect change and choices to take advantage of these opportunities, or to let them pass by. It is the story of a woman who learns to overcome her greatest weakness despite her difficulties to express herself in a foreign language far away from home.