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Book trailer for All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.
Rebecca Donner talks about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack’s role in the underground resistance at a virtual event hosted by the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
The historian David Clay Large interviews Rebecca Donner at a Zoom event hosted by the free Library of Philadelphia.
Rebecca Donner is interviewed by the biographer Sydney Stern.
Click here to listen to an interview with Rebecca Donner on NPR.
Click here to listen to an interview with Rebecca Donner on the New York Times Book Review podcast.
Click here to listen to an interview with Rebecca Donner on The Maris Review podcast.
Click on the icons below to follow Rebecca Donner on social media:
Q & A WIth Rebecca DonnER
Author of the instant New York TImes Bestselling Book
All the frequent troubles of our days
Q: Who was Mildred Harnack?
RD: Mildred Harnack was an American graduate student from Wisconsin who became a leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during Hitler’s regime. Few people know her story.
Q: How did you hear about her?
RD: Mildred is my great-great-aunt. Three generations separate us. She’s an enigmatic, historically misunderstood woman who has intrigued me since I was a teenager, when my grandmother pressed a fragile bundle of Mildred’s letters into my hands and urged me to tell her story.
Q: Why did you write Mildred’s story in the present tense in your book?
RD: To bring a sense of immediacy to the story. Germany went from a parliamentary democracy to a totalitarian dictatorship in just six months. Mildred was there when the Nazi party won 3% of the vote, then 18%, then 44%. My readers are with her on the streets of Berlin, witnessing the rise of fascism.
Q: How did a young American from Milwaukee become involved in the German resistance?
RD: Mildred was the daughter of a suffragist. She was deeply inspired by the Progressive movement in Wisconsin, which was the first state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 and grant women the right to vote. Mildred went to college at the University of Wisconsin, which accepted both women and men, and in 1926 she received a master’s degree. The same year she married Arvid Harnack, a German graduate student who shared her passion for women’s rights. In 1929, at the age of twenty-six, she moved to Germany to pursue a PhD and witnessed the meteoric rise in Hitler’s popularity. She began holding secret meetings to discuss how best to oppose Hitler. She helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Nazi atrocities and called for revolution. During the Second World War she engaged in espionage, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies.
Q: Can you describe the people in her underground resistance group?
RD: The group was diverse: its members were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, atheist. They were factory workers and office workers, students and professors, journalists and artists. What united them was their opposition to Hitler. Most were in their twenties and thirties. Gestapo records show that approximately forty percent were women.
Q: Did the group have a name? How many people were in it?
RD: Mildred privately referred to the group as “the Circle.” Over the course of eight years, the Circle intersected with three other underground resistance groups—Tat Kreis, Rittmeister Kreis, and Gegner Kreis—forming an interlocking chain. By 1940 there were approximately sixty Germans in this group, which continued to recruit new members as the Second World War progressed. In 1942, the Gestapo arrested 119 of them.
AN instant NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER, National Book critics circle award
WINNER, PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD
winner, THE chautauqua prize
A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A New York Times Book Review Critics’ Top Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
A TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of the Year
The Economist’s Best Book of the Year
A New York Post Best Book of the Year
A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of the Year
An Oprah Daily Best New Book of August
A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
A New York Public Library Book of the Week
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of the Year
A Barnes & Noble Best Audiobook of the Year
“Astonishing…wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography….[an] extraordinarily intimate book… Donner is Harnack’s great-great-niece, so this is a family history too. It is also a story of code names and dead drops, a real-life thriller with a cruel ending — not to mention an account of Hitler’s ascent from attention-seeking buffoon to genocidal Führer….Donner’s decision to narrate events in the present tense [is] an effective device for conveying what it felt like in real time to experience the tightening vise of the Nazi regime.” – Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“A gorgeous collage of history and family lore, a revelatory window onto a Götterdämmerung that transformed the world forever.” – Oprah Daily, named a Best New Book of August
"Rebecca Donner has written a beautifully rich portrait of a very brave woman. While never less than scrupulously researched, this biography explodes the genre of 'biography': experimental but achieved, Donner's story reads with the speed of a thriller, the depth of a novel, and the urgency of an essay, like some deeply compelling blend of Alan Furst and W.G. Sebald." – JAMES WOOD
A stunning literary achievement. Rebecca Donner forges a new kind of biography—almost novelistic in style and tone, this scholarly work resurrects the courageous life of Mildred Harnack. A relentless sleuth in the archives, Donner has written a page-turner story of espionage, love and betrayal. – KAI BIRD, winner of the Pulitzer Prizer for Biography
“This is a powerful book. A nonfiction narrative with the pace of a political thriller, it’s imbued with suspense and dread.” – The Wall Street Journal
“Rebecca Donner’s passionate, page-turning book, “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days”...melds history and biography. She brings forensic and literary skills — along with access to family papers and a key witness — to a story at once deeply personal and broadly inspiring” – The Boston Globe
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days sets the remarkable story of resistance fighter Mildred Harnack against the backdrop of daily life in Germany as Hitler tightened his grip. Epic in sweep, written with a novelist’s attention to detail and a historian’s perspective on social and political forces, this book opens up new possibilities for biography. – RUTH FRANKLIN, winner of the NBCC Award for Biography, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Combining meticulous scholarship and sparkling narrative brio, Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days brings to life for the first time the central role played by Mildred Harnack in Germany’s homegrown opposition to Nazi rule. Donner’s portrait of the cruelly oppressive system against which Harnack and her circle fought serves to remind us of what can happen when, amidst economic insecurity and anguish over dislocating socio-cultural change, a highly civilized nation embraces demagoguery over democracy. – DAVID CLAY LARGE, author of Berlin
How can it happen that a constitution, a free press, and a democracy be demolished — all within six months? This powerfully written story of Mildred Harnack, resistance fighter against Hitler, tells step by step the way the German republic fell to the Nazis. Read All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, and be warned. – MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, winner of the National Book Award, author of The Woman Warrior
“It’s against a tense backdrop of political terror that we recognise Mildred’s extraordinary bravery. This is a superb, sure-footed work of historical detection conceived with a powerful intelligence.” – The Sunday Times (UK)
“A tour de force of investigation… The story unfolds in fragments… but as the pieces cohere, the couple’s story becomes gripping… The abiding impression is of virtuous, extraordinarily brave people caught up in tragic horror.”–The Economist
“Despite its ostensibly forbidding subject matter this is a thrilling and inspiring book...a treasure trove for lovers of biography, new writing and the history of the Third Reich.” – The Scotsman (UK)
“Donner has clearly worked hard in East German, Soviet, and recently released American archives to tell an impressive story.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Donner’s meticulous research and novelist’s sensibility make for a riveting biography of a remarkable and brave woman.” – Library Journal
"[A] stunning biography...Donner’s research is impeccable, and her fluid prose and vivid character sketches keep the pages turning.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)