Customer Reviews

When I Was a German, 1934-1945: An Englishwoman in Nazi Germany

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Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness". Christabel informs and entertains us, her writing is engaging and a world beyond the simple "diary entry" accounts. She is very perceptive, and her impressions from inside Nazi Germany, as a non-German, help us to better understand the people who brought Nazism to the world. Her writing style puts you right there in the minds and hearts of simple villagers, Nazi officials and those opposed to them. It also brings us a fresh perspective, one perhaps not encountered in other books on the subject. I have read numerous books, diaries and accounts of life in Nazi Germany (and Europe in general) and can highly recommend this one.

Fascinating account of life in Nazi Germany as told by an Englishwoman who had married a German aristocrat in 1934. Not as profound as Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness" but still one of the best of its genre. I liked it even more than Iris Origo's "War in Val D'Orcia" which I also highly recommend.

Bielenberg writes beautifully, and although the narrative can be a little confusing at times, certain passages of "When I was a German" read to me like bits of "found poetry." Unfortunately a few typographical errors mar this edition; an historical document this important deserves better.

There was a British television series produced in 1988 based on this book, called "Christabel" and shown in the United States on Masterpiece Theater. Bielenberg also testifies in various episodes of the "World at War" television series, which I am now looking forward to seeing again.

Until I read this book I never realized there were British (and American) women who had married Germans prior to the outbreak of WWII and actually lived in that "enemy" country while we were at war with them. The author suffered along with the German cicil population as the allies methodically bombarded Nazi Germany into submission. The constant fear of daily aerial bombings,hunger, and the fear of the Gestapo make this an epic story of survival.Better than fiction!

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Let everybody know tnat this book, published in 1998 by the University of Nebraska, is also available at Amazon US as "The Past is Myself" (Import). So be aware of the dishonest trap publishers and (silent) Amazon itself lay out for the reader. Greed gnaws at the heart of the system indeed!

This fragment of autobio is a good choice for a seconf or third read about (mostly) wartime life in Germany under the Nazis. I say second or third because the English writer's German husband came from the upper-upper Hamburg class and belonged to some kind of resistance or anti-Nazi movement more or less connected with the organizers of the 1944 plot, and she therefore didn't move in the same circle as ordinary Germans, so from that point of view she is unrepresentative.

This doesn't matter so much when speaking of crowded trains or the bombings, but it affects her political stance and therefore how she regarded the war. I guess an "intelligent" and "honest" Nazi (although there weren't such according to an ingenious and popular [?] joke she tells) might have experienced things differently.

But all in all the book seems to be sincere, is well-written and reads very easily: it is (now) politically correct and fits nicely into our "Western, Christian tradition". Some passages I found outstanding; and the episode with the Baltic SS officer is IMO a one-page masterpiece. It reminded me of a chapter of Dostoievski's "The Brothers Karamazov".

So if you already know something about the history of the period, have read some other wartime bio written by a lower-class German civilian, and don't own the American version, buy the book. Overall, it's not memorable despite the passages mentioned above, but you won't regret it.

This was a good deal at the time, and by shipping it with more priority, was able to obtain it in the amount of time I needed.