ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS

Historical biography of an American woman who led resistance groups against the Nazis before Hitler personally ordered her execution in 1943.

Donner’s subject is Mildred Harnack (1902-1943), who traveled to Germany in 1929 to obtain a doctorate in literature. She opposed Hitler even before he came to power in 1933 and spent 10 years in the resistance before her arrest and execution. Specific facts about the lives of people who aim to leave no evidence are hard to come by (“her aim was self-erasure”), but Donner has clearly worked hard in East German, Soviet, and recently released American archives to tell an impressive story. Living mostly in Berlin, Harnack earned money by lecturing, translating, and teaching English. In the first years of Nazi rule, when public opposition was possible, she made no secret of her beliefs and organized informal meetings in her apartment to “discuss Germany’s political climate.” After several years, her group moved underground and began active resistance, largely by printing and distributing leaflets. Many urged readers to sabotage military production. Harnack’s group came to be known as the Red Orchestra, but this was a name given by German intelligence. Orchestra described any enemy network, and Red labeled it as communist. Although sympathetic to the Soviet Union, Harnack may not have engaged directly in espionage. Others did, however, and it was an intercepted transmission from Moscow that provided information that led to her 1942 arrest. Harnack was a brave idealist, and she died for her beliefs, but Donner—like many historians of civilians who opposed Hitler—largely passes over the painful fact their efforts did not significantly inconvenience the Nazis. Mostly novelistic, the narrative contains some manufactured tension, melodrama, and passages of purple prose and paragraphs broken apart or clipped short to create a dramatic effect that feels forced.

Despite the breathless delivery, this is a welcome contribution to the history of the anti-Nazi underground.