What Fiction are you reading this week, July 24, 2022?

[japple]

22. After a break to read Louise Erdrich's latest book, The Sentence, I am getting back to WWII

with Rebecca Donner's All the Frequent Troubles of our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler." This is a very exciting and informative read--what was going on in the 30s and early 40s in Germany seems errily similar to what is going on in this country today.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.

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.

Many thanks for the weekly thread, hermetic. Glad to note that you are still chilling. Me, too.