Born in East Germany at the height of the Cold War, David Hutter still has vivid memories of going from ‘black and white’ to ‘Technicolor’ on the day his family was allowed to leave for Hamburg in December 1985. Not quite a ‘sliding doors moment’ perhaps, as their emigration to West Germany had been rubberstamped by the Communist authorities. But 6-year-old David was nonetheless amazed by the sliding doors at Hamburg Altona station, having never seen anything like it before.
Fifteen years later, in the spring of 2000, David and his parents took his paternal grandmother to see the sleepy village in Ukraine where she’d grown up before having to leave in the early 1940s, never to return for the next six decades. A few months later, David embarked on his first move abroad, leaving Hamburg for Italy, where he spent two years studying at Pavia University before relocating to London to pursue a degree in Creative Writing.
After working as a writer and editor for various U.K. publishers and agencies for many years, he wrote the satirical novella FAKE NEWS: Strange historical facts reimagined in the world of Donald Trump, which British newspaper The Independent named as one of the 10 best books on Trump’s presidency. In turn, David was able to establish himself as a ghostwriter, writing memoirs, novels, and scripts for clients from around the world. At the same time, he has also produced TV and movie scripts that have won awards in the U.S. and the U.K.
As well as writing, David’s greatest passion is traveling, having been to places as far afield as China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, most of Europe, and vast parts of North America—whether it’s attending a rodeo in Okeechobee, Florida; seeing members of the Grateful Dead play in Marin County, California; discovering the birthplace of the Women’s Rights Movement in Seneca Falls, Upstate New York; heading to the source of the Mississippi in rural Minnesota; watching the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park; exploring the filming locations of Forrest Gump and The Big Chill in Beaufort, South Carolina; or visiting the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee at an age when he was still too young to drink (thankfully, it’s a dry county anyway, so he didn’t miss out).
Nowadays, David tries to connect his half-German, half-Eritrean yet essentially British young sons to their Teutonic roots by taking them back to his home turf in Hamburg, as well as places such as the Baltic Sea, the Bavarian Alps, and the Harz Mountains. At the same time, he tries to broaden their horizons by visiting the birthplaces of Germans who ‘made it big’ in America, like Carl Laemmle, founder of Hollywood’s Universal Pictures.
Being fluent in German, and with his unrivaled research skills, as well as his ability as a storyteller to bring bygone times to life, David will provide a comprehensive and engaging picture of your ancestors’ journey to the New World that will resonate with you, leaving a lasting impression of your forefathers’ challenges, struggles, and achievements that ultimately served to create modern society.
