All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

Rebecca Donner

Description

SELECTED AS A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKBorn and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six and living in Germany when she witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. She began holding secret meetings in her apartment, forming a small band of political activists set on helping Jews escape, denouncing Hitler and calling for revolution. When the Second World War began, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. In this astonishing work of non-fiction, Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on extensive archival research, fusing elements of biography, political thriller and scholarly detective story to tell a powerful, epic tale of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir
• 20th century
• World War II

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786892201
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Rebecca Donner is the New York Times bestselling author of two critically acclaimed books, and her essays, reportage and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times , Bookforum and Guernica . Donner was inspired to write All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days after her grandmother gave her a bundle of Mildred’s letters. @RRRDonner | rebeccadonner.com
Also by Rebecca Donner
Sunset Terrace
Burnout
 
 
The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain in 2021
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
First published in the USA in 2021
by Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group,
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Rebecca Donner, 2021
The right of Rebecca Donner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Excerpt from Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm, copyright © 2015 by Sarah Helm. Used by permission of Nan A. Talese, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpt from The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe by Richard S. Kennedy and Paschal Reeves, copyright © 1970 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.org . Excerpt from The ‘House Prison’ at Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin: Terror and Resistance is reprinted with the kind permission of Stiftung Topographie des Terrors. Excerpts from Two Thousand and Ten Days of Hitler , copyright © 1940 by Patsy Ziemer. Reprinted with the kind permission of Barbara Eadie Myer of the Estate of Patsy Ziemer.
Illustration credits begin here
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 221 8 eISBN 978 1 78689 220 1
For Mildred and Don
Contents

Author’s Note
Fragment
Introduction
The Boy with the Blue Knapsack (1939)
MILDRED
I (1902–1933)
We Must Change This Situation as Soon as Possible
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Good Morning, Sunshine
The BAG
II (1933–1934)
Fragment
Chancellor Hitler
Two Nazi Ministers
A Whisper, a Nod
The People’s Radio
The Reichstag Fire
An Act of Sabotage
Mildred’s Recruits
Tumbling Like Dominoes
Torched
Dietrich Does Battle with the Aryan Clause
Arvid Burns His Own Book
THE BOY
III (1938–1939)
American in Berlin
Don’t Dawdle
MILDRED
IV (1933–1935)
The Proper Care of Cactus Plants
Fair Bright Transparent
Two Kinds of Parties
Bugged
Esthonia, and Other Imaginary Women
Arvid Gets a Job
Thieves, Forgers, Liars, Traitors
Rudolf Ditzen, aka Hans Fallada
The Night of the Long Knives
THE BOY
V (1939)
A Molekül and Other Small Things
The Kansas Jack Gang
MILDRED
VI (1935–1937)
Fragment
A New Strategy
Bye-Bye, Treaty of Versailles
Tommy
Monkey Business
Rindersteak Nazi
An Old Pal from ARPLAN
Spies Among Us
Beheadings Are Back
Widerstand
Ernst and Ernst
Identity Crisis
VII (1937–1939)
Homecoming
Georgina’s Tremors, Big and Small
Jane in Love
My Little Girl
A Circle Within the Circle
A Child, Almost
Stalin and the Dwarf
Boris’s Last Letter
Seeking Allies
THE BOY
VIII (1937–1940)
Morgenthau’s Man
Joy Ride
Lunch Before Kristallnacht
Getting to Be Pretty Good
A Fateful Decision
Air Raid
Louise Heath’s Diary
Mamzelle and Mildred and Mole
MILDRED
IX (1940–1942)
Fragment
Foreign Excellent Trench Coats
Corsican Drops a Bombshell
Libs and Mildred Among the Cups and Spoons
AGIS and Other Agitations
Zoya Ivanovna Rybkina’s Eleven-Page Table
Stalin’s Obscenity
Hans Coppi’s First Message
Anatoly Gurevich, aka Kent, aka Vincente Sierra, aka Victor Sukolov
Code Red
A Single Error
Gollnow
One Pain Among So Many
Oil in the Caucasus
X (1942–1945)
Fragment
Arrest
The Gestapo Album
Knock-Knock
Falk Does His Best
Wolfgang’s Seventh Interrogation
Kassiber
The Red Orchestra Is Neither All Red nor Particularly Musical
Anneliese and Witch Bones
Hitler’s Bloodhound
The First of Many Trials
Mildred’s Cellmate
The Greatest Bit of Bad Luck
The Armband She Wore
The Mannhardt Guillotine
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
Stieve’s List
The Final Solution
Gertrud
XI (1942–1952)
Harriette’s Rage
Valkyrie
Recruited
By Chance
Arvid’s Letter
THE BOY
XII (1946)
Don Goes Back
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction.
Any words that appear between quotation marks are from a letter, a postcard, a memoir, a diary, a handwritten note, a declassified intelligence report, or other document that I discovered in an archive.
In books, newspaper articles, and archival documents, Mildred appears variously as Mildred Harnack, Mildred Fish-Harnack, and Mildred Harnack-Fish. The confusion stems from Mildred herself. In the United States, she called herself Mildred Fish-Harnack; in Germany, she called herself Mildred Harnack-Fish. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to her in these pages as Mildred Harnack.
Mildred was known to many as a woman who chose her words carefully. “Her utterances were sparse,” a German woman remembered, “often with a surprising clarity.” “She listened quietly,” an American woman recalled. “When she did speak, she commanded attention.” If you flip to the end of the book you’ll see the sources for these quotations. Throughout this book I use endnotes, not footnotes, to cite my sources.
This book follows two narratives: one chronicles Mildred, and one chronicles a boy named Don. In Don’s chapters, I use italics instead of quotation marks to indicate the thoughts and conversations he remembered having during that time. During the Second World War, at the age of eleven, Don became Mildred’s courier.
The title of this book comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that Mildred translated in her prison cell. There is some debate about whether an “s” can be discerned at the end of the word “trouble” in Mildred’s original handwritten translation. We must bear in mind that translation is an art, not a science; Mildred’s translations were often looser, and less literal, than the academic renditions of Goethe poems that we may encounter. We must also bear in mind that Mildred wrote with a pencil stub in a damp prison cell.
Harald Poelchau remembered seeing Mildred bent over the book of Goethe poems, the pencil stub in her hand, when he visited her prison cell. Poelchau worked as a chaplain of the prison and was a member of an underground resistance group founded in the rural town of Kreisau in Silesia. It is because of Poelchau that we have Mildred’s translations of Goethe. On February 16, 1943, he slipped the book into the folds of his robe and smuggled it out.
 
Fragment Questionnaire Plötzensee Prison, Berlin February 16, 1943   Last name Harnack First name Mildred Date of birth 9/16/02 Place of birth Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA Do you have assets? How much and what do they include? 8.47 (?) in my pocket 1 ship ticket United States Lines $127 (paid in Reichsmark) in my purse some money in Deutsche Bank Apartment furnishings, especially in the two front rooms, Woyrschstr. 16, Berlin, with two Oriental carpets; a light and a dark one with uneven stars and colors Why are you punished now? Do you admit committing the crime you are charged with? In which circumstances and for what reason did you commit the crime? Accomplice in treason
Introduction
H ER AIM WAS SELF-ERASURE. T HE more invisible she was, the better her chances of survival. In her journal she noted what she ate, read, thought. The first was uncontroversial. The second and third were not. For this reason, she hid the journal. When she suspected the Gestapo was closing in on her, she destroyed it. Burned it, most likely.
She was at the harrowing center of the German resistance, but she wasn’t German, nor was she Polish or French. She was American—conspicuously so. The men she recruited acquired code names: Armless, Beamer, Worker. She operated under no code name. Still, she was elusive. The nature of her work required absolute secrecy. She didn’t dare tell her family, who were scattered across the towns and dairy farms of the Midwest. They remained bewildered that she, at twenty-six, had jumped aboard a steamer ship and crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind everyone she loved.
Her family is my family. Three generations separate us. She preferred anonymity, so I will whisper her name: Mildred Harnack .
In 1932, she held her first clandestine meeting in her apartment—a small band of political activists that grew into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin by the end of the decade. During the Second World War, her group collaborated with a Soviet espionage network that conspired to defeat Hitler, employing agents and operatives in Paris, Geneva, Brussels, and Berlin. In the fall of 1942, the Gestapo pounced. She was thrown in prison. So were her coconspirators. During a hastily convened trial at the Reichskriegsgericht—the Reich Court-Martial—a prosecutor who’d earned the moniker “Hitler’s Bloodhound” hammered them with questions.
She sat on a wooden chair in the back of the courtroom. Other chairs held high-ranking Nazi officers. At the center of the room sat a panel of five judges. Everyone there was German except her.
When it was her turn, she approached the stand. She was emaciated, her lungs ravaged by tuberculosis she’d contracted in prison. How long she stood there remains unknown; surviving documents don’t note the time the prosecutor began questioning her or the time he stopped. What is known is this: the