All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

I greatly admire how this book subverts the traditional form of biography in a way that perfectly suits the subject.

Mildred Harnack, the author’s great-great-aunt, was an astoundingly brave young woman from Wisconsin who, starting in the early 1930s, had a central role in Berlin’s homegrown opposition to the Nazis and was eventually beheaded on orders from Hitler.

Drawing on diaries, letters, photographs, interviews, and declassified intelligence documents, Donner tells an extraordinarily intimate story that reads like a literary novel and has the pace of a thriller.

This book is a biography about Mildred Harnack, an American woman who became a leader of the German resistance.

Rebecca Donner is the great-great-niece of the protagonist, Mildred Harnack, in All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days.

Ms. Harnack met her German husband while they were graduate students at University of Wisconsin. While serving as university professors in Berlin, the young married couple was appalled by the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

They circulated pamphlets that encouraged resistance to the Nazis and passed along secret information to the allies.

The author’s great grandmother, who joined her aunt Mildred in… show more.