Books like Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945

Upfront: I would rate this book zero stars for its literary value but 5 stars for its highly interesting contents.If you are interested in historical facts connected with WWII (especially the failed bomb attack on Hitler by Count Stauffenberg and his allies, who had planned to not only kill Hitler but to overthrow the Nazi regime), this book is a must-read. If you are looking for literary value, do yourself a favor and stay away from this book.This said, I am attempting to review this book, which is not an easy task.I need to divide this review into different parts and also evaluate this book from different aspects. First, I would like to mention that this book contains 46 photographs, most of which I found interesting.And now it gets difficult. The author died in 1978, at age 61. “De mortui nil nisi bene. (Don’t say anything but good about the dead.)” I am sorry, but if I wanted to adhere to this, I could not possibly review this book. So I must disregard this command.The first half of this book is not really what I would call a diary; it reads more like the log book of an escort, registering dinner outings with friends and acquaintances of both sexes (almost all of which aristocrats) and attendances of a seemingly endless succession of dance parties and other celebrations (at various embassies but also at private castles and mansions) with aristocrats, political higher uppers, and other celebrities. All this while WWII was raging, Berlin was being bombed, and while people were dying in collapsed or burning buildings, or just simply in the streets, hit by flying debris. Apart from that, I have never found as much name dropping in any book I have ever read. Everybody the author had to do with seemed to be a prince, a princess, a count, a countess, or at least, a baron, a baroness, or a celebrity, such as a famous fighter plane pilot or a movie star. Not that I am allergic against name dropping. I can usually take quite a bit of it before I get annoyed, but what’s too much, is too much! Well, maybe this wasn’t the author’s fault. She just lived in different social circles than I did.What really puzzled me, however, was why the author would be invited to so many dinners, parties, and other events. All right, she was an aristocrat, a Russian princess whose parents had fled with their children from the Russian Revolution to settle in Lithuania, where they had owned an estate, and from which they had to flee again, this time to Germany, when the Russians invaded the country after Hitler had invaded Poland. Nice to learn that aristocrats stick together and help each other in need. But does this mean that they have to continuously invite each other to restaurants, private dinners, dance parties, and overnight-visits?Let’s face it: The author, while educated and multilingual, did not seem to be overly intelligent. (Otherwise, she would not only have acted but also written in a different way.) Thus, she was unlikely to have been a highly sought-after conversation partner. And what puzzled me even more: How could she possibly have had the means to go out about every second night, quite often walking long distances on foot? Mind you, she was invited and didn’t have to pay for the food or drink. (Lobster and oysters, she reports, did not require ration stamps. And there always seemed to be wine and champagne at first choice restaurants and hotels, as well as in private castles and mansions.) However, shoes wear out, especially when walking on pavement. They also wear out with dancing. Stockings wear out even faster. And there was a terrible shortage of shoes and stockings during WWII. You needed coupons to buy clothes, shoes, stockings, and other non-food items. These coupons were never enough to purchase supplies for normal wear. (Besides, when there was no merchandise in the stores, coupons would not buy you anything.) How could one possibly obtain sufficient amounts of shoes and stockings for excessive wear?—Yes, there was a black market. If you had tons of money, you could probably buy anything. But the author did not have tons of money. She keeps complaining throughout the book that, with her earnings (first working at the German Broadcasting Service, then at the German Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, and later, in Vienna, as a nurse), she could barely make ends meet. I don’t get it. Something is amiss here.What also irritated me quite a bit: Why did this woman not stay put? Why did she have to travel incessantly to meet other aristocrats at far-away castles, taking extra time off work (annoying, quite understandably, her bosses)? Why did she (with lots of luggage!) have to take up space in railway wagons overfilled with stressed refugees from firestorms of carpet-bombed Hamburg and, later, carpet-bombed Berlin? Why was she not content when her office was evacuated to a ski-resort far away from Berlin, where she was considerably more safe than in the capital? Why did she have to make up stories to get to travel back to Berlin (which was, meanwhile, also carpet-bombed)? She mentions that she was bored being away from the big city. Would you be bored being away from a city that was carpet-bombed and where people died by the thousands in almost daily air raids? I wouldn’t.So many questions remain unanswered here. The author never explains the exact hierarchy of the employees at either of her places of employment. I would have been particularly interested in the hierarchy at the Foreign Ministry, where a number of the Stauffenberg plotters had worked. Adam von Trott zu Solz did not seem to be the author’s direct superior, even though she off and on worked together with him. It is clear that the author was very fond of Adam von Trott zu Solz (maybe a bit too fond—the man had wife and children). In any case, they were very close friends, and the author was, obviously, Trott’s confidante. They dined together, spent evenings talking (discussing developing plans to overthrow the Nazi regime), and the author spent occasionally the night at Trott’s apartment (where he lived alone, as women with children had been evacuated to the country). The author also tried to save Trott’s life (and I praise her for this), after he was arrested as one of the plotters of the Stauffenberg conspiracy. The reader never learns how much exactly the author knew about the Stauffenberg conspiracy or whether she might have even been involved in it herself. Even her brother (who edited the book, wrote the foreword and epilogue, and supplemented the book throughout with historical amendments) never learned, as he states in his epilogue. Yet even the incomplete information about this conspiracy (and its horrific outcome for those involved) is fascinating enough to make this book a must-read for everyone interested in this subject, and I might even reread this part of the book at some time. The descriptions of the terrible impacts of carpet-bombing as well as the author’s narrative about her experiences as a nurse in Vienna (while still dining in first grade hotels with champagne flowing) and her adventurous railroad travel to the relative safety of western Austria (and still visiting aristocrats at castles) when the war was about to end, were also quite impressive and informative. However, one might find similar descriptions and narratives elsewhere, in better books.The epilogue, written by the author’s brother, could have enhanced the book, but left me disappointed. The author’s diary entries stopped abruptly on September 17, 1945. Naturally, the reader would like to know how her life went on and what happened to those people frequently mentioned in the diary who had survived the war. The author’s brother shows bad judgement by writing half a page describing the Russian orthodox rituals of the author’s wedding (surprisingly with a commoner, whom we learn very little about). But then, the author’s brother only spends a line or two telling about the accidental deaths of quite a number of the author’s close relatives and friends without giving the slightest details about these accidents. There are many other things, I would have been more interested in than the rituals of a Russian orthodox wedding. There is not a word about the relationship between the author and her future husband (who is not mentioned in the diary and whom she married only four months after the last diary entry). Neither is there a word about the marriage and whether it still existed when the husband died (away from home), only middle-aged. The epilogue did tell some about the life and fate of people the reader of the diary would have become interested in. However, it was my impression that the author’s brother was fed up with the job to get this book to market and, therefore, just regurgitated a few pages of thrown together sentences for the epilogue, which left the reader wanting.Summa summarum: A miserable piece of literature with highly interesting parts about the failed Stauffenberg plot. Also a highly interesting social picture of how the European aristocracy lived even in the worst of times. Yet the latter was, surely, unintentional.P.S. If you have ever wondered why the Russian Revolution had happened, the lifestyle of European aristocrats, as portrayed in this book, might give you the answer. And if you should happen to have a little knowledge of the German language, go to the following link and see how aristocrats were addressed in Germany. Such addresses were, obviously, intended to secure the superiority of aristocrats and keep commoners “in their place”. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnredeI have no idea about the etiquette requirements to address aristocrats in Czarist Russia, but I assume that they were similar to German etiquette.P.P.S. If you wish to learn what it was like for non-aristocratic, non-Nazi people to live in Berlin during WWII, read Heinz Kohler's brilliant memoir, "My Name Was Five". Here is the link to my review of this book:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...