ONLINE: Rebecca Donner

×

Expand

Kathy Ryan

Rebecca Donner

Mystery to Me hosts a talk by Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler. The book tells the story of Milwaukee native Mildred Harnack, who witnessed the rise of the Nazi party while studying in a doctoral program in Germany. Harnack decided to do something about it, and was a leader of the resistance until being captured by the Gestapo and executed on the order of Hitler. Register here for a link to the talk.

press release: The "highly evocative, deeply moving" true account of the extraordinary life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during WWII--"a stunning literary achievement" (Kai Bird, author of The Outlier and co-author of Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus)Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment--a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.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.Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors' testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

Rebecca Donner is the author of the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, published by Little, Brown in the US and Canongate in the UK. A Hebrew translation is forthcoming from Matar Publishing in Israel.

Born in Canada, Rebecca Donner was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. She is the author of Sunset Terrace, a critically acclaimed novel, and Burnout, a graphic novel about ecoterrorism. Her essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Bookforum.

Rebecca Donner was recently shortlisted for a Fulbright Award. She was a 2018-19 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York, is a two-time Yaddo fellow, and has twice been awarded fellowships by Ucross Foundation. She has also held residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Donner is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught writing at Wesleyan University, Columbia University, and Barnard College.