The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg A well-born girl of English and Irish extraction, niece of Lord Northcliffe, declines an Oxford scholarship to study singing under Frau Alma Schadow in Hamburg, marries a young German lawyer there, becomes a German citizen and stays in Germany despite waking up one morning to find Hitler in power, has some children, in rapid succession, and then even moves to Berlin, to be at the heart of some whispered alternative Germany, where people are intelligent, and decent, and loathe the Nazis, and with their bright souls are willing to shepherd the nation back to respectability again, once that monstrous regime has been removed, as surely it will be, if only the Allies could see that, and encourage certain German generals to act, but then the war comes, and so much success, and no one dares move against that, but they can't move in the time of defeats either, because of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, underlined with carpe