Reaching For The Stars

by Nora Waln

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: History

388 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 1991

About the author

Descended from a line of Quakers and sea captains, Nora Waln was born to parents Thomas Lincoln and Lillian Waln. During childhood, she developed a fond interest of Chinese culture after learning of a family friendship with the Lin family resulting from trading in the early 1800’s. In 1919, she began attending Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college founded by Quakers, near Philadelphia. While studying at Swarthmore, Waln was contacted by two members of the Lin family, who were traveling in the United States. They invited her to visit at their Hopei Province homestead in China. During her junior year at Swarthmore, World War I broke out and Waln left school, before graduating.

In 1920, Waln set sail for China. Upon arrival she was taken in by the Lin family as a “daughter of affection.”  Waln ended up living in the Lin house for 12 years and subsequently developed the idea for her memoir House of Exile. The family was considered “exiles” of the Canton Lin homestead because a Lin had been ordered by Kublai Khan, the Mongol Emperor from 1260 to 1294, to help work with the Grand Canal in Hopei.

While living in China, Waln met George Edward Osland-Hill, an English Foreign Service Officer whom she called “Ted.” They were married in Shanghai at the Cathedral for the Church of England in 1922. In 1933, Waln’s House of Exile was published with much esteemed praise. The 12 year memoir of her time spent in China as the adopted “daughter of affection” gave readers an inside look at Chinese culture and customs, such as the “Farmers Calendar,” in addition to the nation’s political and public hardships. Waln had been the first foreigner inside of the Lin home since its founding 650 years prior. The 1933 bestseller not only unobtrusively captured the view of daily life in the Lin household, but also reflected Waln’s insider view of the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.

Waln’s husband retired from the service and became interested in studying music, so in June 1934, the family relocated to Germany. They arrived only two days before the “Blood Purge of 1934. From the very start of Waln’s time in Germany, she experienced much of Hitler’s Nazi movement. She felt compelled to recount her experiences and began working on her next book. Waln and her husband stayed in Germany until 1938, after which they traveled back to Osland-Hill’s native England. In 1939, Waln published Reaching for the Stars, an account of her time spent in Germany. In the book Waln shared her very optimistic view that the people of Germany would not allow Hitler’s National Socialism to last. She based her beliefs on Chinese political theory, following the notion that such an educated people would revolt after the realization of the dangerous communism in the works. By the end of World War II, however, Waln was less certain as so many of those who were strongly against the Nazis had been killed. Reaching for the Stars was a bestseller in the United States and was reissued in 1994 under the title The Approaching Storm: One Woman’s Story of Germany 1934-1938.

In 1940, Waln was granted an honorary degree of Master of Arts form Swarthmore College. Waln traveled a great deal throughout the 1940’s, seeing Asia, Europe, and the Americas. After the war, she lectured across the United States, all of the proceeds went to war relief funding. In 1946, Waln became the European Administrator for the Kappa Kappa Gamma fund for Refugee Children.

Waln contributed articles as Tokyo correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post from 1947 to 1951. She also contributed to Atlantic Monthly as a correspondent from Germany and Scandinavia, after which she freelanced. Waln was one of the few journalists to report from China and Mongolia.  In 1958, Waln’s husband passed away.  She spent her last three years residing near Malaga in Southern Spain.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1939, and thus unbiased by hindsight of later horrors, this is a highly sympathetic yet unsparing eye-witness account of life in Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1938. Nora Waln's status as a German-speaking American quaker woman married to a wealthy British dilettante enabled her to travel extensively throughout the Reich and talk more or less freely with people in all walks of life - from farmers and rural innkeepers and maids to castled aristocrats. The result is a remarkably clear window into the social dynamics in the background of all the momentous historical events, and it is remarkably topical.

Too often, the history books ask us to accept as truisms statements to the effect that "not all Germans were nazis" but "all Germans were complicit in nazism." This book brings those statements and the tensions within and between them to colorful life as Waln profiles enthusiastic and committed nazis, Germans who suffered ruinous persecution for opposing or even questioning the regime, and a great mass of people who simply wanted to get along with their lives - even at the cost of turning a blind eye to ever-greater atrocities.

This is a memoir of course, and not an analytical or carefully evaluated history, so reader: be warned. Yet it is one of the best sources I have found for bringing the daily struggles of ordinary people trying to cope with an awful transformation of their society out of the realm of black and white and into full color. Anyone who struggles to understand why Nazism could flourish in a society committed to rationality, why those who opposed it allowed their voices to be muffled, why a majority of such a society eventually aligned themselves with a manifesto they disagreed with, would do well to find a copy of this book and read it.

Note: it was (much) later reprinted under the title "The Approaching Storm," which is better click-bait perhaps, but ultimately much less appropriate to Waln's hopeful-in-the-face-of-hopelessness thesis.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am interested in accounts of life in Germany in the 1930s that were written at the time. Nora Waln was an American Quaker writer and journalist and her account of living in Germany & Austria at that time is both entertaining and fascinating. Not so much for the big things that we all know about but for the tiny details of oppression in every day life - "the Propaganda Minister announced at a festival that he had issued instructions forbidding from that day criticism of art, literature, music and drama. The command against critical expression extends to remarks about stage, cinema, and concert performances. The Government decides what is good and what is bad; the people's part is to be grateful for what they are given".

[Susan Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider this one of the most telling books on the development of mindsets within Germany that allowed the Nazi regime's rise and the disastrous consequences that followed. Nora Waln, a woman who had no political affiliation or investment in what was occurring about her as she sojourned with her husband in Germany, gave an on-the-ground description from her knowledge of families who lived and worked there during that era. This is a priceless read for serious students of this period of history. The book was later republished as The Approaching Storm, and copies of this version are rare.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Different insight into nazi germany.