True to Both Their Selves
Christabel Bielenberg, The Past is Myself
In 1934, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, Christabel Burton, a beautiful woman from an influential Anglo-Irish family, married a liberal young German lawyer, Peter Bielenberg, and they settled in Berlin. When Allied bombing made the city too dangerous she fled with their children to a small village in the Black Forest, where she experienced a very different society from the Nazi-dominated one she had left behind. The Past Is Myself is her surprising account of life in that ‘other Germany’, and of her own nail-biting encounter with the Nazi regime.
Katrin FitzHerbert, True to Both My Selves
By the time she was 14 Katrin FitzHerbert had lived in nearly thirty different places and attended fourteen schools – an unusual childhood, and the more so because it gave her two separate identities, one formed in Hitler’s Germany, the other in post-war England. In True to Both My Selves she tells the gripping story of her family, and of growing up as the child of a half-English mother and a German father, a man she idolized but who was a committed member of the Nazi Party. With great courage and honesty she describes how she moved from a childhood dedicated to Fascism to face her past and make the final choice ‘between England and Papa’.
Kindness of Strangers
‘If you get out now, Gnädige Frau, you can take the underground and you will be in the city in no time,’ said a fellow traveller to Christabel Bielenberg on a stationary train just outside...
Read moreA Hybrid Life
By the time she was 14 and finally settled with her family in their own house in Totnes, Devon, Katrin FitzHerbert – or Kay Norris, as she was then – had lived in nearly thirty different places...
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