She misses Arvid, who is in Washington, DC, on official business for the Ministry of Economics. Every American official Arvid meets in the State Department believes he’s a devout Nazi. The man he pretends to be is a horrible, horrible lie.
Lies spill out of Mildred too.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, p. 258
This Wicked Game 2
January 13, 2022 at 8:15 pm (Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Arvid Harnack, biographies, causes, COVID Reading, heroes, history, Mildred Harnack, nonfiction, reading lists, resistance, tragic characters
Sentence of the Day, 2nd Wednesday of 2022
January 12, 2022 at 9:55 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Berlin, COVID Reading, heroes, history, nonfiction, reading lists, resistance, World War II
“I have put my revenge in cold storage.”
— Harro Schulze-Boysen, after his release from a concentration camp
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, p. 217
Ernst von Salomon “ran into him on a crowded sidewalk in Berlin. Harro’s face was so disfigured that Ernst didn’t recognize his friend at first. “His features were very different,” Ernst reflected years later in a memoir. “He had lost half an ear and his face was covered with inflamed wounds that had scarcely healed.”
His crime? “Preparations for high treason.” He “published an anti-Nazi underground newspaper called Gegner (Opponent). “SS officers raided the office and smashed the printing press.” At the time of his first arrest, in 1935, he was 26.
Self finds out from Wikipedia that he was executed in 1942. He was 33.