All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner (2021) | Book Review
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner Genres: Biography, Non-Fiction
Original Publication Date: 2021
Source: I purchased this book
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All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days describes the life and death of Mildred Harnack. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.
Table of Contents
All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days by Rebecca Donner
When Mildred Fish was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, a German graduate student who shared many of the same interests – especially political.
They shared a passion for left-wing politics. They fell in love and eventually married.
Arvid came from a very intellectual and distinguished German family.
Arvid and Mildred eventually moved to Germany. They planned to have a rich, productive life in the intellectual and academic worlds.
Berlin was a vibrant place in during the Weimar Republic. Mildred loved it.
But the Nazis were gaining power, and in 1933 Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany:
Meanwhile, Chancellor Hitler will invalidate the Weimar Constitution, destroy Germany’s parliamentary democracy, and engineer its complete and total transformation into a dictatorship. All this, in just six months.
They used relentless propaganda to get their way. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Trump wants to do.
The Nazis decided that radio was their best weapon, so they sold a cheap radio called The People’s Radio that everyone could afford. You can only get German broadcasts:
Now that Germans were cut off from the rest of the world, Nazi propaganda would be all the more successful.
Although there were warning signs of an impending dictatorship, no one took Hitler seriously at first.
The Red Orchestra
Mildred and Arvid Harnack knew that they must do SOMETHING. As intellectuals and academics, they were horrified by the Nazi rise to power.
The Red Orchestra was formed from different resistance groups in Berlin.
According to The German Resistance Memorial Center:
In the mid-1930s, circles of friendship, discussion, and learning formed in Berlin around Arvid Harnack, a senior executive officer in the Reich Ministry of Economics, and his wife Mildred, along with the Reich Ministry of Aviation employee Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife Libertas. Through personal contacts, a loose network of seven Berlin resistance circles came into being in 1940/41. They united more than 150 opponents of National Socialism from very different social origins and ideological traditions: students, artists, journalists, and civil servants, many of them women.
Mildred calls the group that comes to the apartment a discussion circle. In time, she and Arvid will shorten the name and refer to it simply as the Circle. Some members are Mildred’s students. Some are friends. Some are friends of friends. They are factory workers and writers, lawyers and professors. They are Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, atheist.
They discuss the current situation in Germany:
What is happening? they ask. What can we do?
Final Analysis
Mildred Fish Harnack was the great-great-aunt of the author of this book.
This is a terrific book. You understand how The Red Orchestra came into existence, and how much danger the members of the German Resistance were. So many members of the “orchestra” paid with their lives.
Mildred was incredibly brave.
So was Arvid Harnack, who actually worked INSIDE the German government passed secrets to the Soviets.
One of these secrets was that Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union.
Joseph Stalin was told this, and DID NOT BELIEVE IT. He naively trusted Hitler after signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Incredible.
Mildred Fish Harnack was the only American woman in the heart of the Germany resistance, and the only American woman ordered to be executed by Adolph Hitler.
Here is an excellent review of this book by the New York Times:
The American Resistance Leader Executed on Hitler’s Orders
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