Rebecca Donner - All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler.
5⭐
Genre: History, Non-Fiction, Biography, WW2, Memoir
Pages: 562
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Canongate
Date Published: 4th August 2022
Big thanks to Canongate for sending me a copy of this book to read and review.
Book Blurb:
When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.
Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.
Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
My Review:
This book was amazing! So beautifully
written and researched but so heart-wrenching and moving at the same time. It
was one of the books that are just so hard to put down as it is written more
like a novel rather than a biography. I also didn’t know much about Mildred Harnack
but I am so glad I had a chance to read this book and her story. It was such an
eye-opener for me. Such a great piece of non-fiction and going straight to the
top of my non-fiction books read in 2022.
This story is about Mildred
Harnack, an American woman who was at the heart of the German resistance
movement against the Nazi regime during Hitler's rise to power and WW2. During
this book, we follow Mildred’s life, which was brilliantly reconstructed from
letters, people’s diaries, Mildred’s journals, and other historical documents. Readers
follow Mildred’s story from her childhood in Milwaukee to her meeting her
future husband Arvid, who is German. Then she moves to Germany with Arvid and
starts her Ph.D. studies, alongside lecturing at the University of Berlin.
However, as Hitler is slowly but surely rising to power through the 1930s,
Mildred and Arvid find themselves losing their jobs, their freedom, and their
old life. Thus, not seeing any other way, they both become very active figures
in the German resistance against the Nazis. Mildred deeply intertwined in the
resistance was leading double life, one being a good wife to a German and the second
using leaflets, recruits, and the power of the written word to send a message to
people about the true colors of the Nazi regime.
The whole book was so emotional
but at the same time very interesting and eye-opening. Mildred although American
fought for what she thought was right. Her efforts to help Jews, smuggle resistance
leaflets, write articles against Nazis and Hitler, as well as, recruit people
into the resistance were extraordinary but also very sad since it all did get
her caught and executed. She didn’t use weapons and fear but she used words and
truth to spread the message about the horrors of Hitler's Germany.
This book is a fascinating read
and has it all, the horrors, the fights, the successes, and the losses of living
in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. I strongly believe the beautiful writing just
added a whole new atmosphere and made me as a reader feel like I am there and
seeing events from the point of view of those different characters.
Overall: This book is definitely
one of the best non-fiction books about WW2 I read. I am so glad I had a chance
to read it and learn about such a brave, courageous, intelligent, and ambitious
woman like Mildred Harnack. I believe that more people need to hear her story
and thus will I recommend this book wholeheartedly if you are interested in WW2
and German resistance during the 1930s and 1940s.
About the Author:
Rebecca Donner is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, published by Little, Brown. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the 2022 PEN /Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the 2022 Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Plutarch Award. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days was also selected as a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021, a New York Times Notable Book, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Economist.
Rebecca Donner was recently awarded a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship. She was a 2018-19 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York, is a two-time Yaddo fellow, and has twice been awarded fellowships by the Ucross Foundation. She has also held residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Donner is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught at Wesleyan University, Columbia University, and Barnard College.
Born in Canada, Donner was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. She is the author of Sunset Terrace, a critically acclaimed novel, and Burnout, a graphic novel about eco-terrorism. Her essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Bookforum.
