Recent Read: Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics

Over Christmas I got in a little extra reading time and got to read a book I'd been looking forward to: Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics by Jeremy Schaap. I enjoy reading athletes' stories but didn't know much about Owens' accomplishments. Also, I didn't learn anything about the 1936 Berlin Olympics when I visited the city (but I learned plenty about other things) and was curious. Not only did I get what I needed to know about Owens and Hitler's manipulation of and propaganda for these Olympic games, several other things I've recently read also popped up here.

American Ambassador to Germany William Dodd got box seats during the Berlin Olympics to watch Owens run. (In 2012 I read In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, an account of Dodd's time with his family in Berlin between the World Wars.) Author Thomas Wolfe sat with him in his box watching Owens win his three gold medals in three events (I visited Wolfe's Asheville home a few years ago and have just moved You Can't Go Home Again closer to the top of my reading stack). Also, there was mention of the eugenics programs in effect while Hitler was in power. Unfortunately, the same practices were also happening in some states in America, and exploring the program and its practice in North Carolina after World War II (when many states put an end to these programs) was something I spent a lot of time studying, contemplating and writing about in graduate school. 

Recent Read: Unbroken

At the recommendation of my aunt and a cousin, I recently read Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. They both told me what a great book it is and how much I’d enjoy it. They were right. It’s in the top five books I’ve read in 2012. The story covers two topics I love to read: Olympics and World War II.

The main character is Louis Zamperini, an Italian-American growing up in Southern California who realizes he can run faster and better than anyone else. This talent earns him a spot on the 1936 U.S. Track and Field team for the Berlin Olympics.  There he does very well, and returns home planning to train for a spot on the 1940 Olympic team as well.

Then war comes and Louie, like many other young men around the world is shipped off to fight. Louie is in the Army Air Corps one of six men about a B-29 in the Pacific. On one of their missions, their plane is shot down. Louie and two other crew members survive about three weeks in the rafts with nearly nothing to eat or drink. They are spotted and captured by the Japanese, and sent to a few prisoner of war camps before the war finally ended.

Louie was tortured in brutal, unimaginable ways, which made reading this story difficult in places. The fact that he was able to survive all of his difficulties was just staggering to me as a reader.

Near the end of the story when Louie has returned home to California and married, he is converted to Christianity at a tent revival put on by a young Billy Graham in one of his first revivals. Interestingly, my Netflix movie this week just happened to be Billy: The Early Years of Billy Graham. I’m not sure the movie ever made it to the theaters or if it went straight to DVD. I knew of it because my husband’s aunt, a hairstylist, worked on the set and did the hair of some of the female extras. The movie was a lovely story of Billy growing up on a rural North Carolina farm, attending seminary, meeting his wife and starting a family, and getting his ministry off the ground. The movie ends at one of his early, great successes: his Los Angeles revival, the one attended by Louie.

I’ll be reading in this same theme again, as my book after next is Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics. 

Christopher Isherwood

Shortly after returning to the States from Berlin, I read The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, which had been highly recommended to me. At the end of August I began teaching Advanced Composition once a week to high school juniors and seniors in a homeschooling co-op. For our first class meeting we talked about the act of writing and the many right ways to begin an essay or story. To illustrate my point I cut photos out of my 2009 calendar called "The Writer's Desk" by Jill Krementz (I suppose she compiled the author photos and their quotes?). I cut out several pictures from the calendar and placed one at each students' desk before their arrival. After they arrived and we'd gotten the syllabus discussion out of the way, we talked about them in the context of writing being a mostly solitary act. I didn't realize until class started that one of the photos was of Isherwood. In it he's sitting at his desk and the caption reads "Santa Monica, CA, March 31, 1972." I love when writers follow me around like this.

Keeping up with the Kennedys

I've been on a Kennedy reading kick lately. It started when a friend loaned me the audio CDs of Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, continued when I visited the Museum The Kennedys in Berlin and read Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation, and concluded this week when I finished listening to the (very long!) audiobook in the car of Ted Kennedy's True Compass: A Memoir.

No different than for many others around the world, the Kennedy family absolutely fascinates me. I can't think of any other family that has had so much tragedy. They just continue to hold our interest. I'd wholeheartedly recommend all four of the things mentioned above if you're as interested as I am, and here's why:

In Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy by Jacqueline Kennedy, the interviews were conducted by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. about four months following President Kennedy's assassination. In the eight CDs, the former First Lady answers all kinds of questions about her late husband's political aspirations, his visit to West Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, his health problems and his campaigns for office. Hearing the interviews was particularly interesting. In places you can hear the ice clinking around in Mrs. Kennedy's glass (I wonder what she was drinking), addressing her children when they interrupted the interviews, the traffic on the street outside and muffled whispers of her answers to questions she only wanted Schlesinger to hear. When the long interviews exhausted her and she asks to stop and pick up again later. She is so honest and so candid.

The basis for Museum The Kennedys in Berlin is President Kennedy's 1963 visit and his speech addressing West Berliners near the Brandenburg Gate. The footage of this speech repeats over and over for visitors, who can view personal items of the Kennedy family and many photos taken over the years of the whole clan at Martha's Vineyard, on the campaign trail and in other places. It was one of my favorite things in Berlin.

In experimenting with how to borrow books from the library via my Kindle, I came across Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation by Ellen Fitzpatrick and thought it fit my current theme. In the months after her husband was assassinated, Mrs. Kennedy received over a million and a half letters from Americans of all ages who wrote thoughtful letters expressing their sympathy to the First Lady and her children. Of those million and a half, 250 are included in Letters to Jackie. They are from schoolchildren, postal workers, housewives, military personnel, Republicans, Democrats, hospital workers and every other type of person you can imagine. Some letters are long and eloquently written. Some include poems. Some are short and filled with misspellings and other mistakes. What these letters have in common, though, is that they are all expressing sympathy in touching, heartfelt, personal ways. This collection of letters is really a powerful statement of how average Americans reacted to the loss of their president.

Ted Kennedy's account of all of these things plus many more are recounted in his autobiography, True Compass. Though it was quite long and read by an actor rather than the author, the audio version kept me interested. Ted Kennedy's account of both of his brothers' assassinations and other family tragedies, the support he and the rest of the Kennedys gave to Jacqueline Kennedy upon her husband's death, and his own political campaigns and his personal life are all covered in detail. It was really great to get his perspective on the same events and situations Mrs. Kennedy commented on in her interviews.

I highly recommend all these works if you're as interested in this American family as I am.  

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.

Recent Read: A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

Berlin is a fantastic city and one particular activity stood out above all the rest as my favorite. Berlin Underworlds Association is a nonprofit organization seeking to preserve what's under the surface in this city. In our case, we visited a World War II underground air raid bunker that has been preserved by the group, which conducts several tours a day there.

This tour takes place in a bunker attached to Gesundbrunnan underground station, which is the reason it is one of the few still in existence today (almost all of Berlin's 1,200 or so air raid shelters were destroyed after the war. By the way, Hitler had plans to build 3,000 across the city but the majority were never built).

Here are a few facts I learned (my brain was on overload by the end of this tour):

• Air raids were only supposed to last less than an hour with the idea that more than one could take place on any given evening. Toward the end of the war, the British were bombing Berlin all night and the Americans bombed heavily all day. Because of this, Berliners carried their suitcases with them everywhere they went and wore layers of winter clothing, even in the summer, in case their homes were destroyed.
• Room capacities were painted on the walls, and this capacity was determined by evaluating air quantity for short periods of time. Shelter capacity was most of the time double or triple the sum of the numbers painted on the walls.
• Our tour guide said he's had two people on his tours in the past say they were born in that very shelter during an air raid.
• We learned that in this city that was nearly leveled during World War II that debris is still being uncovered at construction sites and other places around Berlin. For example, a construction crew uncovered a live bomb in 1994 that blew up, killing three, seriously injuring eight, blowing off the entire side of the nearest building, and totaling every car parked on the block. Even today an average of one bomb is uncovered each month in Berlin.
• Reflective paint on the walls was designed to make it light enough in the rooms to see or read a book if the power went out.
• At the end of the war when the Russians marched into the city, some people remained in the air raid shelters for days out of fear and/or the fact that their homes had been destroyed. Unfortunately during the last days many people committed suicide in these shelters, often in bathroom stalls, the only place anyone had any privacy. 
• Also when the city was invaded, Hitler thought their army would invade via the underground system, so he had them flooded with water. Instead of drowning members of the Russian army, 2,000 Germans who remained in these shelters were killed instead.

On this tour, the guide recommended a book called A Woman in Berlin written by an anonymous female journalist about the two months in 1945 while the city fell to the Russian army. The book was published in the 1950s in Europe (but not in Germany until later). The book has gotten further acclaim and circulation since the author's death in 2001, and her identity still has not been revealed.

I read the book over this past weekend and could not put it down. Rather than centering around the activity in an underground air raid shelter, the author writes about the inhabitants of her apartment building who band together, sell each other out, steal from each other and for each other, and protect each other as best they can during this terrible time.

The author describes one awful event after another: mass rape of women regardless of their age, having to house soldiers, being forced into labor duty and clearing debris, and on and on. No wonder people felt safer staying hidden in these bunkers. A Woman in Berlin is a powerful account of the atrocities of war, and was a great read.

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

Recent Read: Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

On the plane back from Germany I started a book I ordered used online last year called Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada (though in some places I've seen the title listed as Every Man Dies Alone). It turns out it was the perfect time to read this novel, one of only two I've rated with five stars on Goodreads this year.

The book takes place in Berlin in 1940 (since I'd just been it was fun to recognize some of the street and place names in the book) and is focused on the residents of an apartment building: an average working couple, a family of Nazi supporters, a pacifist retired judge, a Jewish woman whose husband has already been taken away, and the mail carrier who delivers to their building. A lot of the story focuses on the couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, who is their grief over losing their son in the war, takes an extraordinary stand to oppose the war and Hitler's rule over Germany and most of the rest of Europe. It is a beautiful and terrible story based on a real working-class couple who had remained uninvolved in politics and activism until the death of their son became their call to action.

There is a German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin that I now wish I'd gotten to visit. If I ever get to visit again, I'll be sure to see it.

Read this book. Alone in Berlin is a powerful, powerful statement of how regular people can do bold things, even it means putting their lives at risk but makes a difference, if only for a few others.  

Nazi Book Burning

Berlin commemorates the 1933 Nazi book burning incident in Opera Square where it took place off one of the city's busiest streets. A museum across the street from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe had an exhibit detailing the authors whose books were burned. We visited both sites.

Opera Square is across the street from Humboldt University, and its students were some of the ones who gathered here to burn books. I had heard of this event before, but until I learned more I didn't know that the students decided to do this themselves. A student-run organization called the Nazi German Student Association hosted this event to rid the country of socialist and anti-Nazi literature. I found the article posted on the U.S. Holocaust Museum's website to be helpful.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

In the museum across the street from the Memorial, panels gave information on all the authors whose books were deemed a threat to Nazi society and burned. The one I was most familiar with is Erich Maria Remarque who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. I haven't read this book since my sophomore year of high school, so I'll probably reread it soon. The quiet room showed above was off the main room in the museum. The bookshelves are lined with copies of the same books that were burned, and a solitary chair with a table and a light gives visitors a quiet place to read those books.

In learning more about the Nazi book burning, I was reminded of the book burning held in honor of Hitler's birthday in 1940 in The Book Thief (one of the best books I read all last year), and Fahrenheit 451 which I haven't read since my freshman year of high school. Maybe it's time to reread that one as well.

Aren't you glad to live in a place where we're free to read whatever we want?

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.