The true story of the extraordinary life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of the largest underground resistance group in Berlin who was executed on Hitler’s direct orders-uncovered by her great-great-niece in this riveting, deeply researched account.
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
Little, Brown, May 2021
(chez Sterling Lord Literistic)
What do you do when you suddenly find yourself confronted with a mortal threat to your society’s fundamental, stabilizing principles? Mildred Harnack chose to stand. Milwaukee-born, she was the leader of the largest anti-Nazi resistance group in Germany, and the only American woman to be put to death on Hitler’s orders. Despite its unmatched vastness, the record of World War II atrocity and nobility will forever remain incomplete. This ever-expanding volume of belligerence and courage is perhaps the most gravely gendered historical document we have; a war perpetrated, suffered and recounted by men. There are periodically polite acknowledgments of the roles played by woman in ‘aiding’ the war effort, but these usually have the hollow ring of tokenism. Mildred Harnack’s short but monumental life shows us just how incomplete that record remains. From 1933-42, with her German husband, Arvid, Mildred led a cell that couriered top secret military intelligence to the Allies, helped dissidents and persecuted minorities escape Germany, and distributed literature that encouraged civil disobedience and exposed Nazi plans. Fusing elements of biography, political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner brilliantly interweaves family archives, original research, exclusive interviews with survivors, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
Rebecca Donner is the author of the novel, Sunset Terrace, and a graphic novel, Burnout. Her essays, reportage and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Guernica, and other publications. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University.
In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—”the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology”—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than “Lucy,” then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. FOSSIL MEN is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world’s greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn’t bother going home at night to devote more hours to science
In 1932, Roy Chapman Andrews, president of the men-only Explorers Club, boldly stated to hundreds of female students at Barnard College that “women are not adapted to exploration,” and that women and exploration do not mix. He obviously didn’t know a thing about either… THE GIRL EXPLORERS is the inspirational and untold story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers—an organization of adventurous female world explorers—and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today’s women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the high seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture, and literature. Follow in the footsteps of these rebellious women as they travel the globe in search of new species, widen the understanding of hidden cultures, and break records in spades. For these women dared to go where no woman—or man—had gone before, achieving the unthinkable and breaking through barriers to allow future generations to carry on their important and inspiring work. THE GIRL EXPLORERS is an inspiring examination of forgotten women from history, perfect for fans of bestselling narrative history books like The Radium Girls, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, and Rise of the Rocket Girls.
In 2017 acclaimed journalist Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to ta explore the lives of his exile grandfather Kurt Wolff and émigré father Niko Wolff—two part-Jewish, German-born men who became American citizens. Kurt Wolff broke into the book business in 1909 as partner of Ernst Rowohlt in Leipzig; four years later, at age 26, he went out on his own, publishing Franz Kafka, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, and other writers whose books would be burned by the Nazis. Just after the Reichstag fire in 1933, he and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and eight years later in New York they founded Pantheon Books, which went on to publish