The Mitford Affair

The Mitford Affair by Marie Benedict 352 pages

I have not previously read a lot about the six Mitford sisters, but I’ve known who they are. Six girls/women who grew up and in the highest of the early part of the 20^th century English society.  While each sister had her distinct personality, they were a tight-knit clan. They thought and did exactly as they pleased; rules be damn! Sometimes, it was hard to tell them apart. Especially on the first few chapters where readers are introduced t their nicknames for each other; I had a terrible time keeping them straight!

Author Marie Benedict, one of my favorites by the way, takes on three of the sisters as life in England was rapidly changing. This novel focuses on the period from 1932 to 1941.  Benedict gives us the loves and the lives of three of those sisters (Nancy, Diana and Unity). But don’t worry, the other three (Pamela, Jessica and Deborah) so show up from time to time, especially in the first few chapters.

Fans of Benedict’s know that this will be another character-driven novel, so plot seekers don’t bother.

Diana and Unity are estranged from the rest of the family due to their ties and fascination with Fascism and Nazism.  Diana has an affair with the leaders of the British Union of Fascists and ultimately leaves her husband for the man. Unity has gone to Munich to supposedly study the German language, but becomes so enamored of Adolph Hitler that she stalks him until she becomes part of his inner circle. Historians are unsure of whether she was one of his mistresses, but Benedict gives enough evidence to support that she did.

Nancy has gained fame her own way by writing novels, some of which are still in print today. I did see a collection available online that contains all eight. Nancy has the role of peacekeeper and tires to ease the stress between Diana and Unity and the rest of the family.

Besides the crisp prose, there are two things that really stood out in this novel. First, each chapter is dated and readers get to know what each of the women was up to on each date. Second, Diana and Unity’s chapters were told from a third person point of view while Nancy’s was in first person. I found this jarring as I read. Still “The Mitford Affair,” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Dear Child

Dear Child by Romy Hausmann     343 pages (galley)

Lena and her two children live in a windowless shack deep in the woods, prisoner to the rules set by their captor, the father. He says he is protecting them from the outside world, but when Lena manages to escape, she learns the nightmare hasn't ended. Instead, is she really "Lena," the girl who disappeared 14 years ago? Or is she someone else, scarred to look like Lena? And even though she has escaped, why does she feel like someone is still watching her, waiting to take her back into the woods?

This is a chilling, page-turner of a thriller. A blend of psychological thriller with an edge of horror, the author gives us compelling characters and enough unreliable narrators to keep you guessing until the very end.

Good for readers who enjoyed Room, Gone Girl, and who like unreliable (yet relatable) narrators. You may sleep with the light on after you finish this book.

They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, 378 pages

Journalist Milton Mayer visited Germany in the '30s, reporting on developments there and attempting, unsuccessfully, to get an interview with Hitler.  He returned a decade later to a very different Germany, now occupied by the Allies.  This time, instead of staying in Berlin, he settled in the town of Marburg, where, with some difficulty, he befriended and extensively interviewed ten men who had lived through the Nazi era.  The results form the basis of They Thought They Were Free.  

The first half of the book concentrates on the interview subjects and their experiences, the second half on Mayer's own analysis of Germany and the German people.  The former is far more interesting than the latter, especially given the passage of time.  The personal testimony of the ten men, all of whom had joined the Nazi party at some point, some before but most after Hitler's rise to power, provides a compelling witness to how gradually "decent" men were convinced to accept the unthinkable, how the acceptance of lesser outrages today can lead to the acceptance of greater crimes tomorrow, and how easy it is to ignore injustice when it is happening to someone else.  Movingly, two of the subjects recall moments before the war when they deliberately avoided Jewish acquaintances, not out of fear of being associated with them, but out of shame at their own complicity in the rising tide of anti-Semitism.

The second portion of the book is dominated by Mayer's own views on the effectiveness of the Allied occupation, which are extremely pessimistic.  While the experience of subsequent decades seem to contradict this, it is perhaps worth asking how much the German character has actually changed beyond the rejection of militarism.  Unfortunately, the analysis in this section also raises the suspicion that Mayer's conclusions predated (and therefore partially predetermined) his experiences.

The Taster

 The Taster  by V. S. Alexander   320 pages

Amid the turbulence of World War II, a young German woman finds a precarious haven closer to the source of danger than she ever imagined - one that will propel her through the extremes of privilege and terror under Hitler's dictatorship . . . 

In early 1943, Magda Ritter's parents send her to family in Bavaria, hoping to keep her safe from the Allied bombs strafing Berlin. After an interview with the civil service, Magda is assigned to the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat, and only after weeks of training does she learn that she will be one of several young women tasting the Fuhrer's food, offering herself in sacrifice to keep him from being poisoned.

Perched high in the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof seems worlds away from the realities of battle. Every bite is nerve wracking, but Magda gradually becomes used to her dangerous occupation. Equally dangerous is voicing her misgivings about the war, but her love for a conspirator within the SS, and her growing awareness of the Reich's atrocities, draw Magda into a plot that will test her wits and loyalty in a quest for safety, freedom, and ultimately, vengeance.

I love historical fiction, especially differing perspectives of the same event, proving time and again that reality is never black and white, but many, many shades of grey.  The Taster delights in the promise of young love, exposes aspects of Hitler on a personal level, depicts the dangers of living with paranoid personalities, and most importantly, examines the moral dilemmas and desperate decisions required by those living through war.

Posted By:   Regina C.   (submitted to Jen 5/21/18)

The Orphan's Tale

The Orphan’s Tale by Pan Jenoff       344 pages

 I think NPR said it best: "Christina Baker Kline's ‘Orphan Train’ has collided with the circus caravan from Sara Gruen's ‘Water for Elephants,’ and out of wreck has come Pam Jenoff's ‘The Orphan's Tale.’ The novel is a magical carnival saga, a bit grittier than either of its antecedents, and with more at stake...Jenoff has written a tribute to the human spirit that soars in the midst of epic despair."

And I ask you, “How could I pass this up?”  In short, I didn’t. I quickly moved this one up to the top of my TBR pile and dug right in.

We start with a prologue where an elderly woman makes her way into a new exhibit on European circuses. Based on the dust jacket, I know that it’s either Noa or Astrid.  By the time I reached the prologue’s end, I was hooked. Then the story moves back in time to Germany, 1944.

When Noa is sixteen, she is kicked out of her parents’ home when she discovers she is pregnant by a German officer.  While we only see her after she has given up her baby, we see that she has lost none of that innocence that got her in the family way.  Noa is cleaning a train station and lives in a closet. One night, a train pulls in. Thinking she hears a baby crying, Noa inspects the boxcars and finds a horrific sight. One of the cars’ floor is covered with babies, none more than two years old. Most are dead, frozen, but she pulls one out.

Taking the child, she runs away in the middle of a blizzard. She is found by Astrid and is taken in. Astrid is one of Europe’s leading aerialists, but with a war raging, she is not with her family circus. Instead, she is with her neighbor’s family circus.

The Neuhoff Circus needs another aerialist, so Noa must take to the trapeze to earn her place in these strangers who become family. The young women become close. Almost as if they were sisters, watching out for each other.  Noa kept the baby she stole and named him Theo. One of the major hurdles that they face, is that Astrid is Jewish.

The story is the tale of the circus and its people. I loved reading about how Astrid trained Noa and circus life in the 1940s.  The book ends with an epilogue that gives complete closure to all the supporting characters. It was nice to learn their fate.

The story did get sluggish in the bottom part of the first third. I wanted to give The Orphan’s Tale receives 6 stars, but that blip caused me to award  5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Other Einstein

The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict  304 pages

I don’t know much about scientist Albert Einstein except that he won a Nobel Prize for his Theory of Relativity. I even read, some time ago, Driving Mr. Albert: A Road Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain by Michael Paterniti. All that I remember from that nonfiction piece is that Paterniti, along with the man who performed the autopsy, drove from New Jersey to California with Einstein’s brain to give to Einstein’s granddaughter. It was rather silly, if memory serves me correctly.

So one might wonder why I would be interested in this piece of historical fiction. Basically, I really, really, really enjoy the women-behind-the-men genre that is so popular right now. Other books in this genre that reads might find fascinating are The Paris Wife and The Aviator’s Wife.

In this work, we get to meet Mileva “Mitza” Maric. She is a brilliant woman, studying to be a physicist in the early 20^th century. All her life, her parents have encouraged Mitza to pursue a life of the mind. Not only did they recognize her intelligence, but she had a physical deformity that they believed deemed her unmarriageable.

The story opens in 1896 as Mitza and her father are walking through the humid, “foggy, Zurich streets to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic campus.” She is the only female enrolled to study physics. There are five men in her class, one of whom is Albert Einstein.

The first 100 pages of the novel drag. It seems most of the scenes are repetitive and the science gets in the way. They are about science, Mitza’s determination and brilliance, and the two’s attraction toward each other.

When Mitza and Albert go on a romantic getaway to Lake Como in Italy, the novel takes off. Albert comes off as a royal a**hole. I wonder how much of that is really true. But, this is  biographical fiction.

The Other Einstein receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

Sleepwalkers

The Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy by Hermann Broch, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 648 pages

The Sleepwalkers consists of three interrelated novels spanning thirty years - The Romantic, set in 1888, The Anarchist, set in 1903, and The Realist, set in 1918.  Although featuring different characters, plots, and settings, the three form parts of a single work and are meant to be read together, the cycle tracing the disintegration of values from the delusions of fin de siecle Germany to the crass materialism of the Great War.  The Romantic is Joachim von Pasenow, a military officer struggling to understand the nature of love and honor, torn between his love for his Czech mistress and his idealized dream of a woman of his own social class.  The Anarchist is August Esch, an accountant who longs for freedom and justice but does not know where to even begin looking for either.  The Realist is Huguenau, an army deserter and hustler for whom everything has a price.  He is a wholly new kind of man, entirely different from Major von Pasenow and Herr Esch, who are utterly incapable of preventing his ascendancy.

The Romantic and The Anarchist are fine novels that, with their satirical take on the Romantic Bildungsroman, resemble nothing as much as the existential novels of Sartre and Camus.  The Realist, however, elevates the whole into a work of genius greater than anything the two Frenchmen ever managed to accomplish.  This is true not so much as a result of Broch's deft manipulation of diverse literary genres - the chapters in the final novel shift between poetry, prose, and drama - as the scope and unity of his vision.  The Sleepwalkers is not light reading, but it is a literary masterpiece.

We Will Not Be Silent

We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler by Russell Freedman, 104 pages

“In his signature eloquent prose, backed up by thorough research, Russell Freedman tells the story of Austrian-born Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie. They belonged to Hitler Youth as young children, but began to doubt the Nazi regime. As older students, the Scholls and a few friends formed the White Rose, a campaign of active resistance to Hitler and the Nazis. Risking imprisonment or even execution, the White Rose members distributed leaflets urging Germans to defy the Nazi government. Their belief that freedom was worth dying for will inspire young readers to stand up for what they believe in.”  Any child interested in World War II and the Holocaust will want to read this book.  I won’t say I enjoyed it, because it’s not the type of book you enjoy but it had a lot of information about a part of the resistance in Germany that I didn’t know anything about and the writing was compelling.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson   480 Pages

Erik Larson’s latest book provides me with my second reason why she has no desire to ever, ever take a cruise. The first was all the books I’ve read on the Titanic.

Like Larson, I knew a bit about the sinking the luxury liner Lusitania, but after reading his book, I realize that my knowledge was skimpy at best, embarrassingly wrong at worse. I had always thought that the sinking of the Lusitania and other ships carrying American citizens is what propelled the United States into the Great War. Wrong. President Woodrow Wilson was a cool cucumber after the boat sunk, with the loss of life reaching a total of 1,198 of the 2,000 souls who were on board.

The ship left New York bound for Liverpool, England, on May 1, 1915. She was sunk by a torpedo form the German U-20 on May 7. When she sailed from New York harbor, she was booked to capacity. “This was, according to the New York Times, the greatest number of Europe-bound passengers on a single vessel since the year began.” Rather remarkable given that the war had been raging for ten months.

Larson gives reader lots of background information. I admit to discovering more about the politic of both Germany and the U.S., more about U-boats, and more details about the Lusitania than I ever though I would. Larson is an expert at narrative nonfiction that pulls readers into the story.

And while he is adept at making some boring topics interesting, his true success comes into his details about people. The U-20 commander, Schwieger, was a cold-blooded SOB. He didn’t think twice about sinking boats of all sizes, even those carrying large number of women and children. His main goal on each mission was to put as much tonnage as he could on the bottom of the world’s oceans and seas. The Lusitania’s captain, William Thomas Turner, was a credit to his position. I think I would have like him.

The parts of the book that I enjoyed most were the one about the passengers. Readers get to know several of the passengers. Larson paints vivid pictures of life aboard the liner.

The entire book leads up to the moment that a U-20 torpedo strikes the boat. The horrendous details that follow are enough to give readers nightmares. The sinking read much like the Titanic sinking: people jumping from the ship, the lifeboats (there were enough) not functioning properly, the debris that littered the ocean surface after the boat dropped below the waterline. To me, the most horrifying scenes were the people floating upside down in the water. They had put their lifejackets on incorrectly, thereby causing their heads to be forced underwater.

I give Dead Wake 4 stars out of 5. The details of the ships and the politics were a bit much for me. I think they could have been condensed somewhat. 

Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Fall of the Berlin Wall by William F Buckley Jr, 192 pages

This book could more accurately be titled "The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall".  Buckley briefly explains the nature of the post-war Allied settlement and the development of a - seemingly permanently - divided city.  The construction of the Wall itself and the crisis which followed (the only time, Buckley claims, that American and Soviet tanks actually had their guns trained on one another) is covered more thoroughly, followed by discussion of attempts to circumvent the barrier or to come to terms with it.  Finally, there is a broad overview of the events leading up to the moment when, anti-climatically, the East German government announced in a routine press conference that the Wall was irrelevant, and the epochal repercussions of that announcement.

There isn't any special insight here - it is neither a detailed history of the fall of the Wall (The Collapse) nor an insider's eyewitness account of the events of 1989 (The Magic Lantern), but there is a solid overview of the history of one of the world's most infamous structures.  Throughout, the author allows the mere fact of the Wall to speak eloquently of the nature of the regime that built it.  Buckley's talents as a storyteller make the tale readable and compelling.

Woman in Berlin

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous, translated by Philip Boehm, 261 pages

A revision of entries from a diary kept by an anonymous female journalist living in Berlin from April 20 to June 22, 1945,  A Woman in Berlin is a story of loss, horror, and survival in a situation unimaginable only a few years earlier, although the author is only too aware that Berlin is experiencing at the hands of the Russians what other cities experienced at the hands of the Germans.  In this personal account of the climax of the long nightmare that lasted from 1914 until 1989, there are many such instances of what the author calls "a logical reversal" - ill-fed German POWs laboring where starving Russian POWs had before, the loot of Germany carted off to Russia by the trainload, swastika flags cut up to make red flags to salute the conquerors.  As the diary begins, it is poignantly revealed how Berliners have regressed to prehistoric conditions - without electricity, telephones, or running water, huddled together in cavernous basements, scrounging for food and water, with only rumors for news, aware only of the immediately neighboring communities living similarly troglodytic existences.  The terrible chaos of the fall of the city follows, and it is as horrible as might be imagined - a time when the bodies of suicides were hurriedly buried in backyard gardens, injured horses were butchered by hungry mobs while still alive, and the number of times a woman had been raped became a subject of her small talk over ersatz coffee.  This is gradually replaced by a seeming return to normalcy, but the author's own personal life reflects the fact that some things are forever changed, which leads into the story of the effect of the war and its aftermath on the German psyche, a story at which this book only hints.

Although, as a result of its narrow timeframe, it only hints at the aftereffects of the war, the book is itself a notable part of that story.  It was first published in 1954 in an English translation in the US, and only after five years was a German-language edition produced by a Swiss publisher.  Not surprisingly, it was criticized by many who would have preferred to forget what they had done and endured, and a controversy ensued in the course of which the identity of the author was revealed against her wishes.  The author requested that the book not be reprinted until after her death, which occurred in 2001, leading to it becoming available again after decades as a rarity.

Collapse

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte, 184 pages

In 1989, change swept Eastern Europe.  In Poland and Hungary, competitive elections were held, breaking the Communist monopoly on power.  Unlike other popular uprisings in Warsaw Pact countries during the post-War period, this time the Soviet Union did not use military force to prop up its puppets.  Yet some regimes stood firm against the mounting tide of unrest - none more so than Erich Honecker's hard-line government in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which only encouraged tens of thousands of East Germans to make their way to the West through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The GDR was unique in many ways.  It had the most comprehensive secret police force in the world (one Stasi agent for every 180 citizens, vs one KGB agent for every 600 Soviet citizens).  It shared a long border with a neighboring nation with which it shared a common language, history, and culture, and where many citizens had friends and family.  Finally, it had in its midst an outpost of the West in the form of West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West.  The Wall stood as the ultimate symbol of Communist oppression, the Iron Curtain incarnate in concrete and barbed wire.

Then, in the course of a few hours on November 9, the unthinkable happened.  The Collapse tells the story of how, through a combination of popular determination, official uncertainty, and bureaucratic bungling, the Wall became obsolete in the blink of an eye.  Above all, it shows how this might not have happened, except for the complete failure of moral conviction on the part of the regime.

A Long, Long Way

A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry  304 pages

One of the most powerful novels I have ever read about World War I is Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Now I can add Sebastian Barry's 2005 novel, A Long, Long Way to that very short list.

The Irish author and playwright sends barely eighteen-year-old Willie Dunne to Flanders in this harrowing account of divided loyalties and the realities of war. Willie's story begins with one of the most beautiful first lines I have ever read: He was born in the dying days. The first chapter follows a simple, short recap of Willie's young life and stops when he sees in love at first with the beautiful young Gretta Lawlor.

Next, it's 1914, and Willie finds himself on the front lines, a Dubliner fighting with the Allied forces against Germany on the Western Front. Readers experience the horrors of life in the trenches and the devastating affects of the gas attacks. Willie has never encountered such violence and such a tragic waste of life. Letters from home and his buddies help keep his spirits bolstered, but as friend after friend becomes a statistic in the wounded and dead toll, Willie struggles to understand the new world around him.

When he does get a leave and goes home, Dublin is much different than when he left. While his sisters are overjoyed he's home, his father is deeply disappointed in some of Willie's views, and his sweetheart, Gretta, has bad news for him. He rushes back to the front, more comfortable with the war and the havoc it wracks than he is at home.

While A Long, Long Way is not a page-turner, it is compulsive reading. It was short listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee sums up Barry's work best, A deeply moving story of courage and fidelity" that should be mandatory reading in high school.

German Genius

The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson, 856 pages

The whole history of Germany has been overshadowed by the Holocaust.  It is hard to argue with that statement.  For many, the words "German" and "Germany" immediately evoke images of Hitler and the swastika, and for many English speakers they do not represent much else.  Yet in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany was a center - very nearly the center - of science and culture, making considerable contributions to human knowledge and achievement, indeed, the very terms "culture" and "genius" derive much of their power from how they were defined in German society.  It is these too often forgotten German roots of modernity that are the focus of the first part of Peter Watson's book.  The second part deals with Nazism itself, and how it grew within and interacted with German thinking, and how German thought has attempted to come to terms with the Nazi legacy.

 This is a very ambitious work, but Watson's talent is not quite a match for that ambition.  Perhaps it's because I just read The Long Nineteenth Century, which was largely concerned with providing context and nuance for this era, but The German Genius seems tremendously oversimplified.  Watson's shallow understanding of some of the figures is underlined by his tendency to quote what others have said about them rather than what they themselves said, and to define deep bodies of work by those quotations.  This sometimes results in the figures surveyed seeming isolated, so that while at its best (usually in sections dealing with science or art), The German Genius approaches works like Voltaire's Bastards and Rites of Spring, it more often reads like a biographical encyclopedia.  This is exacerbated by the tight focus on German thinkers, which leads to absurdities such as Marx and Engels being discussed without any mention of Proudhon or Bakunin.  Furthermore, this narrowness of scope makes the book's idolatry of Darwin even more odd.  Watson sometimes acknowledges that nineteenth century German politics did not follow the contours we might expect (progressives, for example, were aggressively nationalistic), but at other times he writes as if they do.  He presents honestly the many differing perspectives on German history advanced by German scholars, but doggedly follows a Lukacs-inspired narrative throughout.

With all of my criticisms and disagreements this is, nonetheless, the kind of work I would like to see more of, in that it actually treats ideas seriously and not as mere appendages of power politics.  The breadth of its ambition is laudable, but marred by the narrowness of its execution.

The Long Nineteenth Century

The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany 1780-1918 by David Blackbourn, 497 pages

This book covers the history of Germany during the period from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the end of the First World War.  From "Germany" the author deliberately excludes Austria after the Austro-Prussian War, a decision which is entirely defensible, but still disappointing.  The book does presume a certain minimal knowledge on the part of the reader (that 1848 was a year of revolutions throughout Europe, for example).  Blackbourn is far less interested in politics than in economics, which, while entirely justified by the importance of urbanization and industrialization in this era, does make for some dull reading.

 

Much of the book consists of qualifications - the bourgeoisie may have taken on certain habits of the old aristocracy, but this was more often an assertion of their pride as bourgeois than an attempt to escape their class, likewise even as the socialists struggled to overturn the existing order they still saw themselves as patriotic Germans, and the artistic glories of German romanticism were balanced by widespread crass materialism and the celebration of wealth and power.  This adds considerable nuance to an era that is often oversimplified by terms like "Industrial Revolution", "Prussianism", and "Blood and Iron".  In turn, these poorly understood contradictory aspects would continue to shape German history through the Great War and beyond.

Excellent history, and well worth reading, even if a little dull at times.

All The Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
531 Pages

Set in France during World War II this story follows two main characters; Marie-Laure and Werner.  Marie-Laure is a blind french girl who relocates to Saint Malo from Paris with her father when the Germans invade Paris.  Werner is a German orphan with a gift for electronics who is caught up in the war.  The book charts their tales from the early 30's to the war's end and beyond and how they converge.

Well written and moving this book should be popular with patrons that enjoy historical fiction.

Germany Under The Old Regime

Germany under the Old Regime 1600-1790 by John Gagliardo, 406 pages

This is a history of the "Old Regime" in "Germany", with the former being defined as the order forged in the crucible of the Thirty Years War and broken by the French Revolution, and the latter as the German-speaking portions of the Holy Roman Empire, though Gagliardo unfortunately favors northern Germany to the neglect of the south.  This was the fabled Age of Absolutism, when personal, aristocratic government was gradually replaced by princely despotism enabled by rational bureaucracy.  The Empire struggled with external invasions by the French and the Ottoman Turks as well as internal disunity culminating in the War of Austrian Succession.  In spite of political and religious fragmentation, a distinctively German culture of art, letters, and especially music emerged during this period, enhancing the desire for a united German state even as the rise of Prussia seemed to make that impossible.

A good overview of the subject, the book incorporates lengthy sections on economics, culture, and political administration into its loose narrative.  It is by design an overview, and lacks much detail.  Indeed, overall it is rather bland and colorless.  A worthwhile read, but nothing that makes me want to seek out more of Gagliardo's works.