Book Review: Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (Playaway Adult Nonfiction): Anne Nelson: Books
Book Review: Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (Playaway Adult Nonfiction): Anne Nelson: Books
Anne Nelson’s “The Red Orchestra” brings you inside the Nazi resistance — and it’s a real page turner!,
By LEWNYC -
This review is from: Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (Hardcover)
Anne Nelson’s book “The Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler” is one of the most engaging books I have read about this well-documented and painful period in our recent history. The book follows the fates of a group of friends and acquaintances living in Berlin who support each other’s efforts, no matter how audacious or diminutive, to resist the Nazi takeover of Germany starting in the pre-war 1930s. Although this is without doubt a historical text, the narration reads more like a novel than a history book. Against a backdrop of suspense, we are drawn into the daily world of these underground resisters as they battle against Hitler and the Third Reich. Ms. Nelson’s writing style is both unpretentious and captivating. One develops an intimacy with the real-life characters over the course of the book. The extraordinary collection of photographs which accompany the book (some formal, but many candid) literally bring the reader face-to-face with these courageous people. In the end, one can’t help but to cheer on their anti-fascist actions and grieve their personal losses. A page turner, to say the least!
Anne Nelson does some heavy lifting in “The Red Orchestra”,
By JAGNY -
This review is from: Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler (Hardcover)
The author of “The Red Orchestra,” Anne Nelson, does some heavy lifting. In order to give fuller meaning to the stories of individual Berliners who were part of a loosely knit group of Nazi resisters, she adroitly traces the history of the Nazi movement from its inception, through the war and even into the postwar period. Her subjects — writers, actors, bureaucrats, laborers - are revealed through primary sources. This is decidedly not historical fiction; the author fleshes out the stories of individual resisters using letters, diaries, official records and oral histories. The book is highly readable and compelling. Perhaps the book’s most important message, which is not directly expressed by the author, is about the perils of fascism, in any age. Truth-seeking individuals and institutions, in particular journalists, artists, writers and the courts as well, must be protected from government meddling and control.
A tragic story, compellingly told.,
By Carter Brey (New York, NY) -
The author could not have contrived a more moving final paragraph. It was a very beautiful moment and the only way one could end this shattering narrative.
This book has made a huge impression on me. As much as I have, over the years, admired the military men, clerics and aristocrats of the July 20th 1944 group (in particular von Moltke, whom Ms Nelson correctly identifies as a political visionary), it’s difficult for me to grasp the courage, tenacity and resolve of this amazingly heterogeneous group of individuals. I look around me at my cosseted society in peacetime New York at the beginning of the twenty-first century– the gumchewing, gossiping Prada mothers and the Wall Street wonders and the kids with their gizmos and acquired vocabulary of distanced irony– and wonder if we all possess the dormant potential for such action or if those people in Berlin at that time were truly unusual that way. They were so brave and so purposeful.
I suppose that Germany’s loss was our gain, with that huge influx of incredible creative personalities that for fifty years populated the Upper West Side and places like Eclair on 72nd Street.
“Red Orchestra” strikes me as a double tragedy. As tragic as these people’s experience under Reich was, the loss of the Rote Kapelle’s history to the political agendas of East and West made difficult reading as well. What a marvelous thing Anne Nelson has done in marshaling all that research into an unvarnished tribute to their work.
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