All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner

Whether this fateful decision had to do with antifascist expedience or pro-Communist ideology - the Nazis would later call the espionage group Red Orchestra - Donner doesn’t quite decide.ĭonner pieces together Mildred’s life from fragments, sifting through government archives, interviews, photographs, diaries and letters - though some of those diaries and letters were destroyed, and the most personal items weren’t always revealing. Mildred was teaching English and found recruits among her impoverished students by 1935, Arvid had landed a job at the Ministry of Economics, where he was privy to intelligence that he would eventually give to the Soviets. After Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, they started holding secret meetings in their apartment for underground resisters. They met as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, and eventually settled in Berlin. Mildred Fish was born in Milwaukee in 1902 her husband, Arvid Harnack, was German. It is also a story of code names and dead drops, a real-life thriller with a cruel ending - not to mention an account of Hitler’s ascent from attention-seeking buffoon to genocidal Führer. (A diligently researched book about Harnack was published two decades ago, by Shareen Blair Brysac, titled “Resisting Hitler.”) Donner is Harnack’s great-great-niece, so this is a family history too. The heavy gothic font of the German original was accompanied by the ghostly script of her English translation, written with a pencil stub.ĭonner includes an image of that page in “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” a book about Harnack’s life and death that turns out to be wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography. 16, 1943, the day she would be taken to the execution shed and beheaded, a chaplain found Mildred hunched over the poems, scribbling in the margins. The title of Rebecca Donner’s astonishing new book is a line by Goethe, from a volume of his poems that had been smuggled into the cell of Mildred Harnack - an American woman who was shackled in a Berlin prison, awaiting her death sentence by the Nazi regime.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner