Christabel, an English woman, married a German lawyer in 1934. She lived in Germany during the rise of the Nazis and during the war. In this memoir, she chronicles the experiences of herself, her neighbours and friends. Her husband was implicated in the July 20, 1944 bombing of Hitler but survived with the help of friends and Christabel.

From past readings of life in Germany during the war, I knew the there were shortages of food and consumer goods even before the war but to read her experiences of trying to feed and cloth her family brought the difficulties faced by German citizens clearly to the forefront. She also experienced the dissatisfaction of German citizens with Hitler's regime and only the fear of his security forces kept people from protesting although many people fought the system in minor ways.

When she left Berlin to escape the bombing, she settled in the Black Forest among rural peasants where life was improved in that they were able to eat better and live a healthier life but still had to watch out for the snitch. ( )

A few years back I went through a period of reading a fair bit of fictional and non-fictional accounts of WWII. These were told from many perspectives - the Jew who survived the Holocaust and concentration camps, the Brits living in Nazi-occupied Jersey, the post-war German adult struggling with her unrepentant ex-SS mother, the resistance operatives who risked everything to deal a significant blow to the Nazi leadership, stories of lovers caught on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

This autobiography is told from another unique, yet no less interesting, perspective. Chris Bielenberg was a privileged British woman who married a young dashing German lawyer in the early 1930s, becoming a German citizen a few years before the outbreak of WWII. Her husband Peter, an Oxford graduate, quickly leaves the law after witnessing first-hand the complete disregard which Hitler's regime had for fair justice. He and his friends are all heavily against the Nazi regime, and with high connections in both Germany and Britain they use their influence to avoid becoming soldiers, instead taking up senior civilian roles in industry whilst trying to spread the message to the Allies of support within Germany for an uprising against Hitler.

Christabel spends most of her wartime in Berlin and the Black Forest. Her own first-hand account of living in wartime Germany is fascinating, particularly the delicate dances that must be played in every day social interactions when trying to evaluate where the political sympathies of new faces lie. She provides interesting insight into why many everyday Germans became Nazi sympathisers; for many, the high inflation after WW1 caused previously comfortably off Germans to become poor overnight, whilst many of their Jewish neighbours saw their wealth grow in the same period. While many of her neighbours didn't fully agree with all the Nazi ideals, they saw the new regime as the first real opportunity to improve their situation, and there was little sympathy for the Jews who they felt had profited from their own misfortune.

The wide variance of political feeling amongst Bielenberg's friends and neighbours was incredibly interesting. It would be easy for us to look back so many decades later and tar all Germans of that era with the same brush of being at best Nazi sympathisers and at worst Nazi activists. Bielenberg paints another picture - that of a wide group of everyday Germans who despised what Hitler and the Nazis were doing to Germany, to the Allies, to their own people. Their every day normality was of tapped home telephone lines, of unplugging the telephones to have anti-Nazi political conversations at home and with friends, of avoiding Nazi sympathising colleagues and neighbours who would be quick to whistleblow, of taking months to ascertain the political sympathies of the new neighbours next door, of following the party line when speaking with strangers in train carriages.

Those who sympathised with the Nazi regime could also not be straightforwardly pigeon-holed. Whilst many carried out despicable acts, many others were kind to Bielenberg and her family during the war, particularly when she was placed under house arrest in the Black Forest.

As a British woman living in Germany, hers was a precarious situation. She was at risk not only of becoming a victim of yet another Allied raid, but of being turned over to the Gestapo as an enemy within. Highly intelligent, it's clear she used both her guile, charm and social position on many an occasion to survive the war. Similarly, it's clear her husband had been able to use his social influence to avoid the German military, but near the end of the war his life was put at great risk when a number of his close friends fail in an attempt to assassinate Hitler and he is arrested and sent to Ravensbrück.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, if "enjoyed" is the right word. Perhaps a better word is that I now feel a little more educated on the complexities of German feelings and sympathies during WWII having read it. There is often not much that is black and white in this world, and this book goes some way to explain the shades of grey that existed in Germany during this period. Like all autobiographies, we only have the perspective of the author and the light that he or she wants to portray on actions they have taken. I sense that the Bielenbergs were incredibly privileged and fortunate compared to others, yet theirs was also a hard and long war.

4 stars - a fascinating social and political WWII commentary from an unusual perspective. ( )

The first two thirds of the book are a little slow, but the final third more than makes up for it. The final chapters and thrilling and chilling. ( )

I have had this book for many years now and it is classic holocaust literature. ( )

Worth reading just for the part where she visits the SS (in darned gloves, the SS really appreciate thriftiness) to create an alibi for her husband. ( )