{review} until the final hour

Traudl Junge (with Melissa Müller) Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary (2003)

Joachim Fest Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2005)

  

Both of these books proclaim on their covers that they were the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie Downfall, which I have on whatever is the TBR equivalent of a To-Be-Watched pile. 

Now all the self-delusion is over. Finally, at last, that desperate, seductive voice in me is silenced, the part of me that wouldn't see and know reality, that wanted to believe. At the same time I suddenly feel very sorry for Hitler. A hopelessly disappointed man, toppled from the greatest heights, broken, lonely... I feel guilty all of a sudden. 

Traudl Junge, as the title suggests, was Hitler's last secretary. Junge was only 22 in 1942 when she began this role. This book is structured as a journal (although it was composed in 1947 rather than contemporaneously) of her time with Hitler. It is an extraordinary read, primarily, I think, because it offers such an intimate perspective on day to day life at the highest echelons of power as the Reich and its leader began to crumble. 

Traudl Junge on her wedding day, June 1943 (source)

I approached it with a somewhat cautious eye: after all, this was someone who lived at close quarters with Hitler for three years; who was remarkably lucky to escape with her life when Berlin fell; and who presumably had a vested interest in denazification. Junge, in general, manages to walk a fine line between criticism ("But this time it did disturb me a lot to find someone describing himself as a genius") and enthusiasm (as when Hitler survives the von Stauffenberg - Valkyrie - bombing). Incidentally, she notes "he looked like a hedgehog" post-explosion.

Mostly, however, her memoir captures the viewpoint, concerns and enthusiasms of a young woman and offer rich details about, for instance, Hitler's views on lipstick (negative), smoking (ultra-anti), food preferences (bland and vegetarian), his health fads (many), marriages (a keen matchmaker), fondness for tea-parties, music ("The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey Serenade'"), lederhosen (his knees were too white: see here), and avoiding provincial hotel rooms without en-suites because of the embarrassment of returning from the loo along a corridor lined with saluting yokels. There are also odd insights like Eva Braun's dislike of fat women and her desire to be a "beautiful corpse". As the end draws near, Junge captures moments of great pitifulness: the look on the face of the eldest Goebbels' child, or Frau Goebbels declaration that "Our children have no place in Germany as it will be after the war." The Goebbels will, of course, kill themselves and their six children. 

One cannot help thinking about Arendt on the banality of evil. Junge has stated elsewhere that Hitler was "a pleasant boss". This boss sometimes seems far more like a Chaplinesque Great Dictator than a monstrous psychopath who would refer to his decision not to eliminate "thousands" back in 1934 coup thus: "Afterwards one regrets having been so benevolent."

It was salutary therefore to read Junge's memoir alongside Joachim Fest's account of the last days in the bunker, which retold the entire story from a rather more black-and-white viewpoint. 

The bunker as photographed by William Vandivert, the first American photographer 
to access the bunker after the fall of Berlin (source)

This is a very readable, almost popular, account of the last days, with plenty of structuring of the events within with those outside Berlin to give a broader historical perspective. Fest asks very interesting questions, the most significant (I thought) being - was what happened in Berlin inevitable? Fest's book is nearly as good as Junge's memoir at capturing the claustrophobia of those last days, trapped in a concrete bunker thirty-three feet below ground with a madman and an entourage that veered wildly between sycophantic and downright treacherous: "With treachery all around me, only misfortune has remained faithful to me - misfortune and my shepherd dog Blondi" (Hitler). 

I felt depressed for days after reading these books, but the consequences of evil on this scale must never be allowed to be forgotten. 

Rating: both 4/5.

If you liked this... for me it will be Downfall the movie, and probably The Great Dictator to restore my equilibrium.

source

{review} alone in berlin

Hans Fallada Alone in Berlin (1947)

'If only I could be sure they wouldn't torture me, that it would be swift and painless, then I would give myself up to them. I can't stand this waiting any more, and in all probability it is futile. Sooner or later, they'll catch me. Why does every individual survivor matter so much, myself most of all?'

Fallada was the nom-de-plume of Rudolph Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen (1893-1947). Set in Berlin in 1940, Fallada's novel about the attempt of one man and his wife to resist Adolf Hitler is a masterpiece. It is a chilling story of the futility of resistance in a society where all trust has been lost and paranoia has free reign: son betrays father; neighbours turn on one another; no one can trust their closest friends or family members; and any small act of resistance - or defeatist murmur - is punishable by death. I found Alone in Berlin deeply shocking; even more so when I read about Fallada's life during the Nazi years and about the police evidence on which the substance of the plot of Alone in Berlin is based (see more here).

In brief, Alone in Berlin is the story of a penny-pinching and not particularly heroic works' foreman, Otto Quangel, who reacts to the death of his only son in France by deciding to leave postcards throughout the city denouncing Hitler's regime. Pitted against Quangel's ineffectual rebellion (276 postcards over two years) is Gestapo Inspector Escherich and gradually every contact that Quangel and his wife Anna have ever had becomes drawn into the Gestapo's net. No one, it soon becomes apparent, is entirely innocent:

Inspector Laub followed the watchword of the times: Everyone is guilty. You just need to probe for long enough, and you'll find something.

Woven through the story of Quangel's small and futile act of resistance - but resistance nevertheless - are multiple other interconnected narratives which fan slowly outwards from the apartment block in which the Quangels live and draw in his workplace (where, aptly, they make coffins), his son's fiancée, his wife's relatives, various petty crooks, shop-keepers, doctors, other resistants, and even inspector Escherich himself.

'Show me one that isn't afraid!' said the brownshirt contemptuously. 'And it's so unnecessary. They just need to do what we tell them.'
'It's because people have got in the habit of thinking. They have the idea that thinking will help them.'
'They need to do as they're told. The Führer can do their thinking for them.'

Those who find the cards left in stairwells are already so paranoid that they suspect the cards have been left specifically to see what they do when they find them:

Perhaps such cards were a fiendish device, to be distributed among suspicious individuals, to see how they reacted? Perhaps he had been under surveillance for a long time already, and this was just a further means to monitor his response?

Quangel's small act of resistance backfires, and the majority of cards are handed straight in to the Gestapo, enabling the astute Inspector Escherich to construct a map which will slowly but surely lead him to Otto Quangel's doorstep.

'What did you expect anyway, Quangel? You, an ordinary worker, taking on the Führer, who is backed by the Party, the Wehrmacht, the SS, the SA? ... It's ludicrous! ... It's a gnat against an elephant. I don't understand it, a sensible man like you!'
'No, and you never will understand it, either. You see, it doesn't matter if one man fights or ten thousand; if the one man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not. I had to fight...'

Is resistance ever futile? What makes ordinary men and women turn on each other? How did this ever happen? This novel will make you think, a lot.

Typo! undiminshed for undiminished.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... Traudl Junge's account of how a fairly ordinary German girl became Hitler's secretary offers some insights into how the woman on the street became able to overlook what was happening around her: Until the Final Hour - Hitler's Last Secretary.

 

Incidentally, in the US Alone in Berlin is published as Every Man Dies Alone:

 

{review} philip kerr: sero sed serio?

Philip Kerr The One From The Other (2006)

Philip Kerr's detective novels featuring Bernie Gunther are so far superior to almost any other historical crime fiction that I hesitate even to categorise him within that genre. Kerr has perfectly captured an historical period (Germany in the 1930s and 1940s) and has created a protagonist of such quality that he must surely be the new Philip Marlowe:

The house was about a five-minute drive west of the station. A brass plaque on one of the obelisk-shaped gateposts said it was a villa, but probably only because they were a little shy about using a word like 'palace'. It took me a whole minute to climb the steps to the front door, where a fellow dressed to go cheek-to-cheek with Ginger Rogers was waiting to take my hat and act as my scout across the marble plains that lay ahead. He stayed with me as far as the library, then wheeled around silently and set off for home again before it started to get dark.

I first read Kerr's loose trilogy - March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), A German Requiem (1991); published in an omnibus as Berlin Noir (1993) - a few years ago and was disappointed that there were no others in the series. Fortunately, The One From The Other (2006) marked Bernie Gunther's return and has now been joined by A Quiet Flame (2008), If the Dead Rise Not (2009) and Field Grey (forthcoming 2010).

Kerr has a mastery of the gritty details of the 1930s and 40s. Gunther's world is totally believable. There are so many little details which ring true: colours, smells, uncomfortable sensations, etc.:

He smelled faintly of cologne and hypocrisy.

In the half darkness and close confines of the confessional his voice sounded particularly infernal. He probably laid it on a greased rack and left it to smoke over a hickory-wood fire when he went to bed at night.

...I turned to face a man wearing a neat, grey suit with a wing collar that looked as if it had been tailored by Pythagoras.

Kerr also has the ability to shock the reader, as in his account of Dachau, for instance, or in his introduction of real historical figures into the narrative - Eichmann and Heydrich among others. And his stories are tight. I'm quite interested in 'coincidence' - so many crime novels depend on coincidence to tie up the ends neatly. A cross-over book like William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms, for example, plays with coincidence in an overt manner; it asks us to think about coincidence. Coincidence is also extraordinarily important in The One From The Other, but it is handled so subtlety that it is only towards the close to the book that its significance becomes obvious. Anyway, I mustn't rave on, but these books are extraordinarily well-researched and written. I'm still getting over "preemptive triage" as a euphemism for euthanasia. The sardonic voice of the narrator, the disillusioned detective with a conscience who hides his education under a tough guy façade, is spot-on:

Beneath all this decorative nonsense was an inscription. It read 'Sero sed serio', which was Latin for 'We're richer than you are'.

Amusingly, this is the motto of the Kerr family ("Late, but in earnest") - completely appropriate for someone who leaves a series untouched for fifteen years, then turns in a Meisterwerk.

  

I read The One From The Other between two historical accounts of Berlin at the end of World War II - Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary by Traudl Junge (with Melissa Müller) and the shocking, anonymous A Woman in Berlin. Kerr's grasp of the period is so good that he segues in between these 'real' histories almost seamlessly:

I beckoned the waiter towards me. He had Hindenburg's moustache, Hitler's blue eyes, and Adenauer's personality. It was like being served by fifty years of German history.

Typo! p.254 (you're for your).

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this...: I enjoyed the first book in David Downing's WW2 series, Zoo Station (2007). Another more fluffy, but very well written and enjoyable post-war Berlin detective story is M. M. Kaye's Death in Berlin (1955).