Rebbeca Donner (2021) All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days. The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler.

Rebbeca Donner (2021) All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days. The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler.

 I write eulogies. They’re short as our lives. We lived. We died. But here’s a funny thing (you might not know) about those things that happened, in-between. These by far are my most popular posts. Well, apart from that one about a new bathroom—with pictures—that almost went viral. I’d people I don’t even know commenting on my lavvy pan. Personally, I don’t give a fuck. I didn’t even put that post up. My next most popular posts are when I admitted to being hacked. Posts about football get a few ‘reads’. Films and books like this, less so.

Rants about the moron’s moron, Trump, being fascist, evil, and worse than that an incompetent hick whose greatest achievement has been to move the Doomsday clock closer to midnight, well, nobody much ‘reads’ those or seems to care. Putin, Trump's contemporary and Russian state sponsored running dog, gained such rich rewards from a small investment that three years of war with Ukraine and hundreds of thousands of deaths are disregarded. Similarly, Stalin made invisible, both at home and abroad, the state-sanctioned starvation of millions of Ukrainians (the breadbasket of Russia). Ironically, both Russia and America have not been made great again. Both have proven much weaker than expected, with China moving to the forefront of global economic powers by investments at home and abroad.   

But Mildred Harnack, her husband,  and soul-mate, Arvid, understood how fascism takes root in the most unexpected of places. In their case, Weimer Germany.  Currently, it is trending in USA, Hungary, Argentina, Chile and it’s making a comeback tour in most European cities including Germany, France and Britain. In Nazi Germany, the Nazis demonized Jews and planned to murder around nine million of them. The Nazis blocked their exit. World ports, including those in America, also blocked their entry. We have forgotten, and even overwritten, the historical lesson about refugees.  

First they came for the Communists,

and I did not speak out—

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists,

and I did not speak out—

because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I did not speak out—

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I did not speak out—

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Arvid was related to the Bonhoeffers. Their families intermarried. Dietrich was one of the few to challenge Hitler and Nazi ideology directly. Mostly the Harnacks and Bonhoeffers worked against the onslaught of Nazi propaganda behind the scenes. The White Rose group attempted to assassinate Hitler and were slaughtered. It was these families that suffered disproptionately.

Nazi racial theories centred on eugenics and mass murder, which Trump supporters consider woke issues such as social justice communism, with sly Nazi salutes a subtext to what is really being signalled to mass rallies of non-wokeists.  

  Rebecca Donner, an American writer, is the great, great niece of Mildred Harnack, who was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the beginning of the 20^th Century (1902). It is unlikely you’ve heard anything about the latter (or the former).

Mildred and Arvid were left-wingers. Supporters of Communism and state planning. They recognised capitalism had failed all but a very few (the 1%). They wanted that clichéd fable, to change the world. How their world ended with world wars. And they never saw the outcome. We do.    

The prison chaplain remembers Mildred, bent over a book of Goethe’s poems—from which the first part of the title comes. Visitors smuggled it in with a pencil stub. In 1943, they sentenced her to six years in prison. Her destination would have been most probably Ravensbruck concentration, which catered for women and foreigners. Her husband had already been hanged for treason. She had been starved and tortured and had tuberculosis. Somehow she seemed unbroken. Hitler ordered her guillotining.

Donner claimed to have rescued Mildred’s memory by finding letters she wrote in her grandmother’s attic. Fact. Not fiction. I’m unconvinced. Factional. But entertaining in a way that Every Man Dies Alone (also known as Alone in Berlin) by the quisling Hans Fallada was boring.

Donner went sideways. Added plucky stories about the all American ‘The Boy’.  The son of Donald Heath and his wife Louise, who worked in the US embassy in Berlin. Don (snr) was charged by the US State Department to find out what was really happening in Germany. He was CIA before it existed. Mildred, who had a Phd in American literature, tutored Don (jnr).

Donald (jnr) looks like you’d imagine Tom Hanks looked when he was twelve. An all American boy, dressed in the standard uniform of the Hitler Youth and carrying state secrets to be smuggled back to America in diplomatic pouches by his father.

Donner cites sources. I.G. Farben (the biggest chemical company in the world) four-year-plan, for example, was Hitler’s four-year-plan. In the same way, the often mis-attributed quote of Henry Ford (who hated Jews and unions) that what was good for Ford was actually good for America, came from Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors, during his confirmation hearings for the position of Secretary of Defense in 1953 such was the interconnected way in which industry and government worked during and post-war-war. The military-industrial complex, in which, perhaps, ironically, Elon Musk, the richest man in the word, a white South-African American is tied in, while promising to cut money to poor people to save money for rich people to save the country. George Orwell recognised that building things to blow up saved capitalism but might give us fascism, even if we weren’t a fascist state, for example, China and Russia. But even his genius would have failed to have put into words the inexplicable rise of the moron’s moron and the curved ball of wokeism as an insidious form of propaganda.

Rebecca Donner rescued Mildred Harnack from obscurity. She liked to sing about the abolitionist John Brown’s body lies ‘a  mouldering in the grave, but his truth goes marching on’. Only it doesn’t. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days sounds and feels very familiar. Read on.

 Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie