Recent Read: Monuments Men

I've finally read and finished, at long last, Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel with Bret Witter, a book I've been looking forward to reading for a long time. It was everything I'd hoped The Forger's Spell would be. Monuments Men is a lengthy book but well written. Short chapters focus on one or two art historians-turned-soldiers at a time, making it easy to keep track of everyone and their whereabouts.

One of my most favorite things about reading on historical places is that if I've been there the place comes alive for me again. If I haven't been there yet, it makes me want to go. Visiting Bavaria's Neuschwanstein Castle was one of the highlights of our family vacation last summer. It was also one of the big hiding places for European works of art during World War II and was part of this book.

The view from the castle is incredible!

Recent Read: The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick

Have you ever had really high hopes for a book and are so disappointed when that book doesn't meet your expectations? It happens.

This summer I went to Atlanta's High Museum's exhibit, "Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshaus." It featured 35 paintings by Dutch artists of centuries past including Vermeer and Rembrandt. I enjoyed it. I loved the beautiful colors and the simple lives portrayed in many of the works. Then, the last painting of the exhibit was "Girl with a Pearl Earring," and seeing it in person was fantastic.

Years ago I read Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and saw the movie. It's the kind of historical fiction I just love.

Then shortly before I visited the High this summer I read the New York Times story, "Report of Nazi-Looted Trove Puts Art World in an Uproar" and was fascinated. This summer in Austria and Germany my family and I learned about the treasures Adolf Hitler and his cronies stored up during the Third Reich.

After that news story I was ready to read The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick, a book I'd bought at the exhibit this summer. I was excited about reading it on my Thanksgiving break. I didn't finish it until the day after Christmas (yes, it's completely unheard of for it to take me a month to read a book). Part of the reason is because I had a busy work life wrapping up 2013. The other reason it because I just plodded through it. It didn't hold my interest and was really a disappointment considering how I'd worked it up beforehand.

The book focused nearly entirely on the forger, Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter who found he could make more money forging the work of the famous Dutch painters of the previous centuries than selling his own original works. Long story short, the book focused way too much, for my taste, on the specifics of how van Meegeren pulled one over on the art world and not nearly enough time talking about the Nazi party officials and their desire to get their hands on the artistic and cultural works of the countries they occupied, and how he was finally found out. Admittedly, I don't have much of a background in art but I do enjoy it. I also enjoy a good story that's told well. If it's historical nonfiction it needs to keep my interest and unfortunately this just didn't measure up.

Recent Reads: Night Falls on the City and The Journey That Saved Curious George

I'm just back from a wonderful family vacation where, unlike my usual vacation reading behavior, I only read one book. It was a long one, related to the trip, and I enjoyed it immensely. It's called Night Falls on the City by Sarah Gainham, and it's historical fiction about Vienna from 1938-1945 during Nazi occupation and World War II. The central character is a prominent Viennese stage actor named Julie who is married to a Jewish lawmaker. He's forced to go into hiding soon after the Nazis make their entrance into Austria, and Julie and their housekeeper Fina have to keep everything under wraps. While in hiding Franzl leads a monotonous existence but spends most of his time writing a book that Julie and a friend named Georgy risk everything to publish without putting Franzl at risk.

I began reading this book on the plane on the way over. The trip culminated in Vienna, so I read the book before bed each night as I looked forward to seeing this elegant city in person (in the meantime there was quite a lot to behold in Munich, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and a few Austrian and German small towns in between). I finally finished the book the day after our return, having read about half of it on the plane ride from Vienna back to the States. It very nearly received five stars from me, and would have been one of the few to get that distinction from me all year. Without Julie and her theater company's too-long and too-drawn out residence in Poland, which didn't relate quite enough to the crux of the book for me, it would have gotten a perfect rating. Nonetheless, it was a fantastic book and I raved about it to my family the whole time we were away.

Then, just after finishing Night Falls on the City I read The Journey that Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey by Louise Borden. As a child I read and loved the Curious George books, but I had no idea all the authors had to go through to get them published. The couple had to escape Paris on bicycles with their manuscripts as the Germans invaded France during World War II. Their first stop was Rio de Janeiro before they settled in New York City. Borden traces their steps across the continents by car, bike and ship, and you realize all the things that could have gone wrong, causing the Reys to lose their Curious George manuscripts. It's really an amazing journey, and both books are wonderful reads.

Here are a few photos from Vienna:

 Schoenbrunn Palace, the Habsburgs' summer residence

 St. Stephen's Cathedral

 The Habsburgs winter residence

Beethoven and me

For the third year in a row, my husband and I participated in Fallen Heroes of Georgia's annual 1K, 5K and 10K at Lake Lanier outside Atlanta. The event honored the 209 Georgia soldiers who have given their lives since 2001. The organization uses the race as a fundraiser to honor these soldiers and their families. Each year, what continues to be so powerful for me is the way each soldier is remembered. Along the race route a sign with a soldier's name, rank, age, hometown and the date he or she was killed in action. Many of these soldiers' family members attend and stand by their family member's sign.

Some friends rode with us this year. On our way out after the race, one of them remarked about how young the majority of the soldiers are who have been killed. Sign after sign reported a soldier's age as 19, 20, 22 years old.

I was reminded of the book I'm rereading right now that my class will begin discussing this week, All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about a group of German soldiers in the trenches during World War I. The narrator Paul keeps commenting on their youth, and feels old compared to the new recruits that keep joining them, even though he is only 20.

"Reinforcements have arrived. The vacancies have been filled and the sacks of straw in the huts are already booked. Some of them are old hands, but there are twenty-five men of a later draft from the base. They are about two years younger than us. Kropp nudges me: 'Seen the infants?'"

I nod. We stick out our chests, shave in the open, shove our hands in our pockets, inspect the recruits and feel ourselves stone-age veterans" (Chapter 3).

Recent Read: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

I've just finished reading a book on Berlin I've been wanting to read forever: In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson (you can see my German reading lists here and here). I've been a fan of Larson ever since I visited Chicago for the first time and read his Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I still have to say that I think his book about Chicago is a bit more compelling, but Garden of Beasts still fascinated me due to my recent visit to Berlin. I could picture some of the places he mentions which is always fun.

From the title of the book I thought the main characters would be William Dodd, American ambassador to Germany, his wife Mattie and their adult children Martha and Bill. Perhaps the more interesting of the foursome were William and daughter Martha, and most of the book centered around the two of them. William had the impossible task of being American liaison and diplomat starting in 1933 in Germany and ending in 1940. He was overworked and underpaid, had difficulty with German government officials and experienced a host of other problems. Besides the work he did while there, his socialite daughter's love life and infatuation with communism is explored (I thought this part was very interesting).

I love when something I read in one book coincides with something I've read previously. There were several such occurrences during this read. First, before departing Chicago for Berlin with her family, Martha had an affair with author Carl Sandburg whose home I visited in Flat Rock, North Carolina, a couple of years ago. Sandburg was later a pallbearer at William's funeral. In chapter seven, Larson says that on William's first day as American ambassador, a new law took effect, "the Law for Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering various physical and mental handicaps." We learned about this is at the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin, and particularly disturbing was the medical experimentation performed on children with disabilities, since they were deemed "unfit" to have families of their own one day. Unfortunately, government-mandated sterilization happened in the early and middle parts of the 20th century in the United States as well. In graduate school for a gender and medicine elective I studied forced and coerced hysterectomies primarily in North Carolina. Today, a state-run foundation in North Carolina is waiting for government funding to award reparations to living victims and their families (here's a recent article from Raleigh's CBS affiliate, WRAL). Martha also had an affair with author Thomas Wolfe when he was visiting Berlin (another North Carolina connection. I visited Wolfe's house a few years ago on the same trip as Sandburg's Connemara).

Martha and a friend were invited on a weekend getaway with one of the few authors who did not leave Germany during Hitler's regime, Hans Fallada, who wrote Alone in Berlin, which I absolutely loved. In chapter 40, Larson says,

"In the months following Hitler's ascension to chancellor, the German writers who were not outright Nazis had quickly divided into two camps - those who believed it was immoral to remain in Germany and those who felt the best strategy was to stay put, recede as much as possible from the world, and wait for the collapse of the Hitler regime. The latter approach became known as 'inner emigration,' and was the path Fallada had chosen."

Finally, in the Sources and Acknowledgements section, Larson mentions that he relied heavily on Christopher Isherwood's books in writing Garden of Beasts (I recently read The Berlin Stories after returning from Germany).

I really enjoyed Garden of Beasts and would recommend it for anyone wanting to know more about the American presence in Berlin from 1933 to the start of World War II.

A German Reading List, Part II

I've had a few more recommendations for books about Germany since my first list. Here goes:

The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story by Peter Schneider
The Innocent by Ian McEwan
The Einstein Girl by Philip Sington
Flight from Berlin by David John
The Drinker by Hans Fallada
Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada

Making Wine History

One of my favorite things about being on vacation is having more time than usual to read. I read quite a lot on my week off recently, one of the books being The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It by Tilar J. Mazzeo. I read it on the plane and found it to be a very interesting story about a woman with a strong business sense for her time who works hard to earn a living in 19th century France after her husband suddenly passed away. She was lucky to be encouraged by both her father and father-in-law as she worked to make champagne accessible to the middle class.

Upon our arrival at our hotel in the Rhine Valley we were offered a glass of champagne during check-in, which only made me appreciate the Widow Clicquot even more, right? (Our hotel is also a winery, so everything they serve there is their own.) A couple days later at the Rheingauer Weinmuseum Bromserburg in Rudesheim, we learned a little about the region's 1,000-year wine producing history, and part of that centered around the sparkling wine produced in the Rhine Valley.

Upon returning to the States, I did investigate Clicquot's famous champagne. At $40 a bottle it's out of my price range, but it was fun to learn about all the effort she put into her work.

Cheers!

A German Reading List

In celebration of our fifth wedding anniversary, my husband and I recently traveled to the Rhine Valley and Berlin. Of course I was on the lookout for interesting books to bring back with me, and I succeeded in finding a few and have some recommendations from others. In honor of this recent trip to Germany, I've compiled a list of German reading material. I'm looking forward to blogging about some of these books going forward. And, I'm open to more suggestions if you have them.

Read
The Reader by Bernard Schlink*
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada* (I'm reading this right now. Cannot put it down.)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak*
The Violin of Auschwitz by Maria Angels Angalda* (OK, so this takes place in Poland, Germany's next door neighbor. It relates and it was a great read, so I included it.)
Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends who Resisted Hitler by Anne Nelson
Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Berlin on the Brink: The Blockade, the Airlift, and the Early Cold War by Daniel F. Harrington
A Good American by Alex George
The Beauty of Transgression: A Berlin Memoir by Danielle De Picciotto

The Good German* by Joseph Kanon (Don't watch the movie. It's terrible even with George Clooney.)
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
A Woman in Berlin by an anonymous author
The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 - 9 November 1989 by Frederick Taylor
Dearest Vicky, Darling Fritz: Queen Victoria's Eldest Daughter and the German Emperor by John Van der Kiste
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark
After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next by Jana Hensel
Hiding Edith: A True Story by Kathy Kacer
Berlin Diaries 1940-1945 by Maria Vassittchikov
The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck

Watch
The Lives of Others
Run Lola Run

Listen
Berlin Stories - Anna Winger's NPR radio series on life in Berlin(These are ready to go on my iPod.)

**Indicates that I've read and enjoyed these books already. No * means it came recommended to me by someone else, or I bought the book in Germany and will soon be reading it.

Booktoberfest

Last night my book club had the event we've been looking forward to for months: Booktoberfest. We ate bratwurst, German potato salad, schnitzel and German chocolate cake, all washed down with root beer. We discussed a book that all of us quite enjoyed: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. If you haven't yet read this book, consider doing so. If you're particularly into World War II-era stories, you'll probably like this. After really enjoying The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Postmistress earlier this year, I was already in the mood, though The Book Thief is, I think, considerably darker.

My thoughts:

• I enjoyed reading a story about what was going on with regular families on a regular street in a regular neighborhood in Germany during World War II. I've done so much reading of similar stories with characters (fictional and nonfictional) from Allied countries that it was a nice change to read about what was happening on German soil. The only other book I've read about Germany from that time period that I can remember is The Good German and it took place just after the war in Potsdam with plenty of Allied soldiers present. 
• I was struck by Hans Hubermann, foster father to the main character, Liesel Meminger. Hans has a heart of gold and hasn't become hardened to the harsh world around him as everyone else has. His ability to see past all the things that divide us as people and see people as what they truly are is a gift, especially considering the time in which he lived. Thanks to Hans, I will probably think of him for the rest of my life each time I see or hear an accordion.
• In places, The Book Thief is extremely difficult to read because of all the injustices the characters are subjected to. Though I've done lots of World War II reading, this really gave me a new perspective of the awfulness and inhumanity of that time. 

Have you read this book? What did you think about it?