All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days Reconstructs a Tragedy

 

ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS (2021)

By Rebecca Donner

Little, Brown and Company, 576 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Rebecca Donner faced a problem I have known. How do you write history based on family lore, fragmentary evidence, and lacunae? The answer is to start with what you know for certain, fill in where possible, and make logical inferences where sources fail.

 

The topic of Donner’s work of non-fiction, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, is embodied in its subtitle: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler. That woman was Mildred Fish Harnack (1902-43), who was Donner’s great-great aunt. She was the only American woman executed via Hitler’s direct order.

 

Mildred was born in Milwaukee, the daughter of lower middle-class parents. She obtained degrees in English literature from the University of Wisconsin, where she met a German national, Arvid Harnack, a Ph.D philosophy student. They married in 1926 and made the fateful decision to move to Berlin in 1930, she to teach and to work on her own Ph.D. The Harnacks were idealistic and allied with socialist groups. Their political values–feminism, women’s suffrage, worker rights, and anti-fascism–were safe enough in 1930, but became increasingly dangerous when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and began to dismantle whatever democracy remained in Germany’s post-World War I Weimar Republic. The Harnacks were among the first to warn that Hitler was an existential threat, not just a loud-mouthed buffoon.

 

The Harnacks tried to play it safe whilst quietly building domestic opposition to Hitler to undermine him. What came to be called The Circle was a loose organization of dedicated idealists like Mildred and Arvid plus various diplomatic personnel that offered clandestine support. Caution aside, The Circle proved no match for the Gestapo. Moreover, some of their contacts, including those in Josef Stalin’s NKVD, proved so incompetent they mentioned names in cables without encrypting them or using aliases. The upshot is that the Harnacks were arrested while trying to flee from Germany in September 1942. Arvid was executed and Mildred was sentenced to six years of hard labor, a sentence vacated by Hitler. On February 16, 1943, she was guillotined.

 

These are the bare facts, pieced together from snippets in archives, mentions in official documents, newspaper reports, diary slivers, and ephemera. Missing are most of Mildred’s letters, which were burned by her older sister. Those lost sources are tragic from a historical point of view, but perhaps not from a literary one. Donner’s reconstructed history reads like a novel, albeit a sometimes disjointed one. Donner had to range far afield to give context for inferential leaps, thus a wide array of characters appear, many of whom are not household names. For instance, one of Mildred’s most effective couriers was Donald Heath, Jr. the young son of an American consul/spy in Berlin. He came to Mildred to be tutored and left with documents to be passed to contacts. We also meet Martha Dodd, the gadfly daughter of the American ambassador, who spied for the Soviet Union.

 

There are so many others that, when added to a narrative that is often non-linear, can seem confusing. Don’t worry about all the names. Instead consider Donner’s succinct account of how the Nazis came to power with blitzkrieg speed and how they undermined democracy via methods distressingly similar to Donald Trump’s tactics: rambling digressions, eliminating non-loyalists, manufacturing internal and external enemies, and justifying repression in the name of making Germany great again. (You could even find parallels between the 1933 Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol.)

 

I found Donner’s subtitle overly dramatic. One could easily argue that The Circle was more a figment of idealistic imaginations than a conspiracy capable of taking down the Nazis. The Circle was effective for a time as a spying operation and in aiding a small number of Jews, but the Harnacks were as a reckless as they were restless. They were correct in their dire warnings and brave in mien and action, but the overall impression is that of a dedicated band of amateurs up against a machine too powerful for their ilk.

 

But let us give credit to Donner for assembling a thrilling collage. If you had any doubt that Hitler and Stalin were monsters, Donner will dispel them in simple (though not simplistic) language. More’s the pity Hitler wasn’t eliminated earlier and that it took six years of war and more than 70 million deaths to accomplish what the Harnacks could not.

 

Rob Weir