All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

by Rebecca Donner

Now that it is autumn, the leaves of trees in a park near the apartment building have begun to turn burgundy and gold, lemon and pumpkin orange.

And Otto? He was Mutterseelenallein. The literal translation is “mother-soul-alone.” A man suffering from this type of sadness is so lonely he feels as if his mother’s soul has been ripped out of his own. When Mildred speaks the German word, it is so much richer and more wretched than any English word for “sad.”

Meanwhile, Chancellor Hitler will invalidate the Weimar Constitution, destroy Germany’s parliamentary democracy, and engineer its complete and total transformation into a dictatorship. All this, in just six months.

Dietrich’s grandmother, who defied the April 1 boycott to buy a quarter pound of butter. When a Storm Trooper guarding the entrance of the store warned her not to buy butter from a Jew, the ninety-one-year-old woman rapped her cane against his jackboots and strode in, declaring, “I shall buy my butter where I always buy it.”

the country roads narrow. Acacia trees spring up on either side, fragrant with blossoms that cluster and hang like grapes. Chestnut trees carry their blossoms like candles, cones of white thrusting up through the leaves.

but a violent change in weather drowns it out. They hear cracks of thunder, see flashes of lightning. It’s a spring storm. The rain falls warm and heavy, and a strong wind shakes the trees.

In some towns, worries about another crippling recession are driving people into panicked buying and hoarding.

Just lik today!