You may not have heard of Mildred Fish Harnack (1902-1943), a Milwaukee-born literature professor, ringleader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and the first American to be guillotined on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Nor is it surprising that her name means nothing: as her great-granddaughter Rebecca Donner (Vancouver, 1971) wrote, her aim was to erase herself from history in order to survive. Not that I paid much attention to the story either. In 2000, Shareen Blair Brysac published Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra, an early biography of the Midwestern country girl decapitated by the Nazis. This title laid much of the groundwork for The Frequent Darkness of Our Days, but it did not provide the narrative required by the characteristic events amidst the devastating reality of those terrible days. This is a different book from those I have read about the years of the Third Reich, about the political, social and criminal phenomenon that never ceases to inspire rivers of ink. And what distinguishes it from others is even more valuable.
Donner summarizes her great-great aunt’s first 30 years in a few short pages. In 1926, she married Arvid Harnack, a German lawyer and doctoral student in philosophy. In 1930 they moved to Berlin, where he briefly taught English and American literature. When the political situation worsened and she was fired, in 1932 she found a job as a teacher at Berlin’s first night school for working-class adults, the only woman on the faculty. That year she hosted her first secret meeting, which was renamed El CÃrculo. Some of its members are his students. Other friends. There are friends of friends: workers and writers, lawyers and professors, Jews, Catholics, Protestants and atheists. There are communists and social democrats around.
Donner focuses almost entirely chronologically on the years between 1932 and 1943. Although time and space are strictly limited, the cast of characters is enormous. At the center of the story are Mildred and Arvid: tall, blond, blue-eyed prototypes of the Aryan race. They interact with Nazis, Americans, and international resistance fighters. The author masters a direct style consisting of short sentences, sometimes consisting of only a few words, just enough to reveal the facts. The pages are written in the present tense, as if writing in the past tense might distract the reader from the story, distracting him or her.
It shows events as if they were happening at the same time. It is intended to be a non-fiction book, not a historical novel, giving it the pulse of a good novel. It is the rise of Nazism told through the eyes of his great-great aunt. He is the ancestor who wrote all of this down and in the process explained it to his mother in a simple way that she could understand. There are a dozen chapters divided into nearly a hundred chapters, consisting of photographs, diary excerpts, fragments of official documents, and letters. The enriching dialogue, though not abundant, helps to revive the thick atmosphere of the years when Mildred was an unfortunate bystander. While Donner is shocked by the abuse Mildred suffers, Donner relentlessly expands on Nazism. One of his most consistent and revealing sources is his great-great-aunt’s correspondence with his mother. This is a book crafted from extensive personal research; its content keeps readers turning the pages, perhaps even in the vain hope that if something positive happens, Mildred and the others around her will survive. Just because they don’t do this doesn’t mean they’ve failed; It means, as Donner dramatically puts it, that they are nobly and naively trying to succeed under extremely difficult circumstances, in a brutal context of life and death.
Arvid and Mildred were arrested while trying to escape Germany on September 6, 1942. On February 16, 1943, Mildred, who copied and translated into English the lines of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem that gave its name to this critically acclaimed work, which was awarded prestigious awards in the USA, was beheaded. Arvid had been executed for two months before.
Source: Informacion
Brandon Hall is an author at “Social Bites”. He is a cultural aficionado who writes about the latest news and developments in the world of art, literature, music, and more. With a passion for the arts and a deep understanding of cultural trends, Brandon provides engaging and thought-provoking articles that keep his readers informed and up-to-date on the latest happenings in the cultural world.