the past is myself

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 carpet bombing and fire storms, and now the German resisters and idealists really are alone, so they act accordingly, and hatch their own bomb plot, which doesn't work, because who sends a guy with one hand (missing two fingers) and an eye patch, for Christ's sake, and the Christabel's husband is in the middle of it, and knows all the wrong people, and is swept up by the Gestapo, and finds himself, ultimately, in Ravensbrück, not quite a fun place, but he is ultimately released, with a limp, thanks to the efforts of his wife and others, and they hide out the rest of the war in a village in the Black Forest, and in the end they move to Ireland, like they should have done to begin with.