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For The Critic

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In 1928, modest young blue-collar English lecturer Mildred Fish arrives in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature.

In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere at the ‘crossroads of Europe’, some papers are still mocking Adolf Hitler; few take him seriously. Mildred sees (up close) the brokenness of American and German capitalism, and (distantly) the apparently level playing-fields of Communist Russia. As the Nazi Party gets its claws into the body politic, she teaches an overtly socialist syllabus: Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, et al. Halfway through her dissertation, the university fires her. She promptly starts work at a free night-school for working class students. “Should Hitler be Chancellor?” she asks them, in her ‘English’ class.

But within six months he turns the country into a dictatorship. Newspapers are closed, political opponents taken into ‘protective custody’, camps built. ‘The situation grows steadily worse,’ Mildred writes to her uncomprehending mother back in Wisconsin. ‘We must change this situation as soon as possible.‘ She and her friends convene a regular ‘discussion circle’ (or Kreis) in her apartment, made up of students, aristocrats, bohemians – even a former member of the Hitler Youth.

She marries the equally-earnest Arvid Harnack (they honeymoon on a picket line in Colorado), a German economist with a fondness for the Soviet model. Arvid is a cousin of the Bonhoeffers, one of whom gets him a job at Lufthansa, then at the Ministry of Economics, where he reports directly to Hjalmar Schacht. He begins urgently leaking evidence of Germany’s war preparations.

Mildred, meanwhile, leverages her friendship with the US ambassador’s giddy daughter Martha Dodd for access to sympathetic American officials, their drinks parties and high-ranking guests. Working as a literary scout, she is able to travel surprisingly freely. In London, once, she tries to recruit Rebecca West.

The Kreis steal documents, print and distribute leaflets, helps Jews escape through consular contacts, translate and smuggle foreign speeches into German factories and government departments (incl. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry!), expose war-profiteering and German atrocities in uniform, and attempt to give crucial economic and military intelligence to the soon-to-be Allies.

The tragedy of Harnack’s life is that it was all for nothing. The British and French having bailed on them (and the nascent Oster conspiracy) at Munich, the Western allies continued to dismiss the idea of any German resistance movement throughout the war. Despite countless warnings, Stalin continued to stare into the funfair mirror of his paranoia until the morning after Barbarossa.

But at the time of her arrest in December 1942, Mildred Harnack was simultaneously teaching English to the SS and at the centre of one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany – a chaotic Venn diagram of diplomats, ministry officials, military officers, broadcasters, engineers, socialist literati, socialites, actual spies, an American 11-year-old, and a journalist turned ‘fortune-teller’ who used her sessions with German soldiers to extract strategic information. Thanks to Arvid’s formal (if reluctant) conversion to paid espionage, she was also very actually in bed with Soviet interests.

It was the Russian connection which ultimately did for them, a callow NKVD chief sending a telegram including Mildred’s name and address undisguised in it: ‘one of the most significant espionage blunders of the Second World War’. The Abwehr dropped the net, and one of the fish (not to say Fish) gave up most of the others.

Arvid received the death sentence. Mildred, extraordinarily, was given only six years’ hard labour – until Hitler personally intervened. She spent her final days in solitary confinement, translating Goethe (whence Donner’s title). On February 16 1943, Mildred Harnack was executed, age 40, in Plötzensee Prison, under the guillotine.

The job of bringing this surprising and courageous woman back to life has fallen to her great-great niece, the Canadian-American essayist and novelist Rebecca Donner.

Donner acknowledges the difficulty of biographing someone whose aim, by definition of her work, ‘was self-erasure.’ Frankly, what Harnack even did from day to day is fairly unclear. I’m not convinced the book quite lands its stated ‘heart of the resistance movement’ claim. And the material does feel a little stretched between Harnack’s arrest and even legitimately related events – like Operation Walkyrie – towards the war’s end.

But Donner’s pacey present-tense narrative – assembled from testimonials, memoirs, diaries, etc. – astutely papers over most of these unfortunate lacunae, while the short chapters and numbered subdivisions combine with clippings, photos, handwriting and so on, to reapply the human touches, add salt for international flavour (English, German and Russian), and illustrate the nightmarish job of tracking Harnack through the often-literally fragmented documentary evidence.

And out of necessity, virtue. From the Chatwinesque details – like the Moscow import-export front called ‘Foreign Excellent Trench Coats’, or the hideously creepy questionnaire the day she died: ‘Do you have especially strong passions? (Drinking, smoking, sexual excess?)’ – to the group’s mugshots, terrible in their banal officialdom, it’s an impressive and compelling excavation.

‘The archives tell us a great deal,’ writes Donner, but ‘much is missing from them.’ Now, at least, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days stands as a memorial for Mildred Harnack. As one of her interrogators once said: “It would make a wonderful novel, if it weren’t so sad.”

—
For The Spectator, in a different edit

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, July 13 1908
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The human population has almost doubled since we landed on the Moon.

Genital preferences are transphobic.

The third umpire will have the final say on the snatch.

It is against the rules to take a lamb to school.

The market for Argentinian chewing-gum manufacture is very hard to break into.

Greek philosophers were not always as wise as they claimed.

Josef Stalin trusted only one man: Adolf Hitler.

An average sentence in a German newspaper is a sublime and impressive curiosity.

Florence and Bertha aren’t among the top 10,000 girls’ names now.

There is no phone reception in West Sussex.

As many histories as possible should be written.

The going rate for one song at a funeral is approx. £150.

The thing that’s best if you’re feeling glum is coconut water with a little rum.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 24 1907
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There is an injury called ‘tennis elbow of the heel’.

The rocks in the Sultanate of Oman are special.

Hitler only started all the Nazi bollocks because he was such a godawful painter.

There is no necessary connection between the poetic vocation on the one hand, and on the other exhibitionism, egoism, and licence.

Too much pudding will choak a dog.

In Tibetan there is no word for a mountain summit.

Stephen Merchant’s dad is stingy.

In June 2009 Edwin Rist stole 299 stuffed birds from the Natural History Museum in Tring, worth $1 million.

Francis Urquhart MP was a lieutenant in the Scots Guards.

Whether our first parent, Adam, had any pretensions to the art of pugilism, is involved in too great obscurity, at this remote period, for us to penetrate into with any possibility of success.

Only four US states require police officers to exhaust alternatives before resorting to deadly force.

The London International Palaeography Summer School offers over 25 courses in palaeography, codicology, and manuscript studies.

Samaritans answer 6000 calls a day in the UK. A further 15,000 phone-calls go unanswered.
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Not the C17th religious nonconformists. Folk who can’t shut up about things.

You know the type. The workplace philosophers; the shouters at the TV; people in whose eyes you see the glint of socialist dictatorship.

They come in every walk of life. Stupid boxers (*tautology klaxon*), old men in pubs, Daily Mail columnists, every comedian who ever hosted an awards night, back-bench Labour MPs, the current president (plus phone) of the United States, Basil F***ing Fawlty.

It’s the humourlessness that really does for them. The veering crazily from ‘point’ to ‘point’. “Do you know what I mean?” they’re always asking. Alas, we always do.

Of course, a lot of ranters are successful enough to get away with it.

Doctor Johnson, one suspects, was probably a dreadful ranter. John McEnroe, obviously. Jeremy Clarkson. Will Self. Naomi Campbell. Mel Gibson. Sir Alex Ferguson was given a knighthood for services to ranting. And then there’s Geoffrey Boycott.

For every Charlie Sheen, mind, there is a Michael Richards.

Still, famous people we can usually switch off. Everyday ranters, though – real live people, whom you might find yourself stuck in a lift with – well, they’re entirely unspeakable. A quite close friend of mine goes apoplectic if he sees a button out of place in military dramas. I’ve had to institute a swear-jar system.

It’s just not really British, is it? (“I’ll rant as well at thou,” quoth Hamlet. But he was from Denmark.) Our all-time-favourite ranting stories end in tumbleweed, embarrassment, and Downfall bunker parodies on YouTube.

Another friend’s somewhat brigadierial granddad once had a long and testy conversation with (e.g.) the British Rail Customer Services Hotline, concluding, “I mean, for God’s sake, man, this is Britain, not bloody Bangalore!?’ The plaintive and predictable reply: “No sir: this is Bangalore.”

As any Oldie worth his salt will vouch, life’s too short, one mustn’t grumble, and almost nothing’s that important, really. My father – curse him – has a good line when he thinks I’m getting exercised o’er trivia: “Is this going to form a chapter in your memoirs?” That tends to do the trick.

—
For The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 17 1908
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A transgender man has had a baby five years after having one as a woman.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai, is known as ‘Fazza’.

‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’ is an advertisement for Hitler or something. It says this under a picture of him.

Old corned-beef’s rusty armour spreads disease.

Nice things cost money.

1.5 people is the exact wrong number to do anything efficiently.

England batsman Alastair Cook has played in his 150th test match at the WACA.

Author Boris Starling’s career began aged eight, when he plagiarised a story from a Tintin novel.

Aristotle walked a lot.

John-Boy Walton’s first spouse was Almira Gonzales. They divorced in 1993.

A female spy was the last woman to be executed in Finland.

Homeopathy is based on the false claim of the benefit of super-diluted substances and the principle of ‘like cures like’. While it has been debunked by hundreds of studies, people still want to believe in magic cures.

Don’t forget, many West Malling shops are open today.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, April 2 1907
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No-one has been found in a major search along the Torridge.

‘Pog mahone’ means ‘kiss my arse’, in Gaelic.

Some people do not like to read instructions.

In South Africa there is a town called Nilstrom, where Afrikaners thought that they had found the Nile.

Hitler was not indifferent to meals.

Embracing one’s girlfriend under lampposts is a bourgeois activity.

A grasshopper has been stuck in a painting by Van Gogh for 128 years.

Every minute, somewhere in the world, a man is taking his own life.

Hastings Banda was once a GP in Kilburn.

Ships of the Royal Navy carried slavery manuals until the 1970s.

For just £299 you can look 20 per cent younger.

The Pacific island of Peleliu cost the 1st Marine Division 6,500 casualties to secure in 1944. No further use was made of it in WW2.

Mediocrity is the one true demonic force.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, October 10 1906

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The Museum of Emotions in London has a game with yes/no answers.

Adolf Hitler fixed the Nazi Party registrations, to make it seem they had more members than they did.

The endnotes to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest comprise their own entire audiobook.

Vandals put lives at risk.

The ‘Blue Danube’ waltz is played on a radio station somewhere in the world every minute of the day and night.

The English county of Midsomer has the highest murder rate of any non-metropolitan area in the UK.

Barns are typically painted red because of nuclear fusion.

In France a few yards of silk can make a nobleman.

The Cutty Sark was still in service in 1953.

‘Orientation’ comes from the fact that the earliest Western maps placed the East at the top, putting Paradise in pole position.

Public procurement expenditure accounts for nearly 50% of the Afghan budget.

The weather in Northern Ireland is always fine.

Girls have a higher chance of getting pregnant than boys.