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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
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SELECTED AS A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKA SUNDAY TIMES BEST PAPERBACK OF 2022Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six and living in Germany when she witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. She began holding secret meetings in her apartment, forming a small band of political activists set on helping Jews escape, denouncing Hitler and calling for revolution. When the Second World War began, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies.In this astonishing work of non-fiction, Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on extensive archival research, fusing elements of biography, political thriller and scholarly detective story to tell a powerful, epic tale of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
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"Of the prizes dedicated to biographies, it was a biography of Mildred Harnack that won both the National Book Critics Circle award for biography in 2022 as well as the Jacqueline Bograd Weld award, awarded by PEN America. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler is the powerful story of an American woman who fell in love with a German student at graduate school at UW–Madison and ended up marrying him and moving to Berlin just as Adolf Hitler was rising to power. Not only is it the life story of an extraordinary person, it’s also a fascinating picture of Berlin in the 1930s (“the very first traffic light in Europe appeared here”). Needless to say, the story ends badly and Harnack was executed after Hitler’s personal intervention, in 1943. The biography is written by Canadian writer Rebecca Donner, Harnack’s great-great-niece."