100 books like White Rose

Out of the Dust was the first verse novel I read. Set during the Dust Bowl of the thirties, I was drawn into the story from the first page. I loved Billy Jo, the main character, and was impressed by Karen Hesse’s ability to capture, in so few words, the dust, desolation, and difficulty of living in Oklahoma at that time. 

The Firefly Letters was another early read. There is nothing that Margarita has written that I’ve not loved, but since this was the first of her books that I read, it has remained a favorite. Her poetic portrait of the early suffragette, Fredrika Bremer, reminded me that when hearts and minds are open, bonds of sisterhood transcend societal restrictions. It is a powerful book whose message continues to resonate. 

The Watch That Ends The Night tells the story of the Titanic through the voices of those who were there. I read this after I had written my own most recent book and was struck with how similarly Allan and I approached historical catastrophes. Both books are multi-voiced and contemplate the same issues of privilege and class distinctions. Like me, Allan chose to listen to nature and endow her with a voice of her own.

This book is set in 1969, before the onslaught of cell phones and social media, when all eyes gazed upward toward the moon. Apollo 11 was preparing for its launch to the heavens, and the main character, Mimi Oliver dreams of becoming an astronaut. But first, as the daughter of a Japanese mother and Black father, Mimi needs to discover her own identity here on earth. The Full Cicada Moon illustrates my core belief that books build bridges between time and culture— just as Mimi does. 

Historian Mark Roseman interviewed Marianne Ellenbogen née Strauss in a suburban house near Liverpool. After she passed away, her son shared with him the diaries and letters he found in the attic. In the summer of 1943 Marianne escaped deportation and hid in various places across Germany, supported by a little-known network of unorthodox socialists. Her life under Nazism was horrible—yet strangely liberating. She flourished away from her strict parents but was still traumatized at leaving them behind. The fate of someone who repeatedly changed her German, Jewish, political, and indeed personal identity will move you emotionally as well as stimulate you intellectually. All along, Marianne struggled to maintain control over her own story—which makes A Past in Hiding a brilliant title for an outstanding book.   

The book tells the story of a small village near Stuttgart during wartime when poverty, hunger, fear, and uncertainty plague every member of the community. Even in the face of unthinkable horrors, the characters perform amazing acts of love, faith, bravery, and sacrifice and ultimately find forgiveness and hope for the future. I really enjoyed the vivid look at the lives of the German Resistance members and what they were willing to do to sacrifice while hiding the marginalized and criminalized citizens the Nazis hunted. Beautifully written as well.

Mildred Fish-Harnack was part of a wide circle of anti-Nazis that formed in the 1930s and continued to grow until it was broken by the Gestapo.

Brysac’s portrait of her is detailed and passionate. The fact that Mildred was American but gave up her life for a ‘better’ Germany never fails to move me. Mildred, her husband, and friends passed Nazi military secrets to the Americans and the Russians, and were to pay a heavy price. Virtually all were rounded up and killed.

Mildred, from Milwaukee, was the only American woman to be executed on Hitler’s personal orders. As the Nazis led her to the guillotine, she whispered, "And I loved Germany so much."

Those words act as an epitaph for all the people whose stories we told in our book: they hated the Nazis but loved Germany and wanted to save it from the horror unfolding under Hitler.

This is not a full biography – the biography Steinert wrote later in her career is not available in English – but many of the ideas in Steinert’s biography can also be found in this earlier work, which has faded into posterity slightly but can be read with great profit. Here, Steinert is concerned to give texture to a hitherto often two-dimensional image of German society and its attitudes to Hitler’s War. The result is an interesting, differentiated account of public opinion in Nazi Germany. In many respects, it was pioneering and opened up questions surrounding the relationship between state and society that other historians went on to explore further in the 1980s. Steinert’s Francophone background, and perhaps the fact that she was a female writer working in a profession that was then very male-dominated, probably account for the fact that her work is less well-known in the English-speaking world… show more.

The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 left Klemperer, a cash-strapped Jewish scholar, without his teaching job in a German university, but somehow sheltered from the worst excesses of Nazism due to his marriage to an “Aryan” German woman. His diaries are a window to the daily life of a childless middle-aged couple that observes world-shaking events from close proximity, while worrying about debts and the high costs of keeping the family car, Klemperer's most cherished possession. 

This crucial book was originally published by Putnam’s, New York, in 1941. 

Riess admitted in his autobiography (which exists only in German) that the book was largely a compilation of material from various sources, much of it handed to him personally by Robert Vansittart, the head of British Intelligence at the time. Large portions of the book were in fact written by Heinrich Pfeifer, and supplied to British Intelligence, part of it on Pfeifer’s two trips to London, and part passed across via Vansittart’s agent Walker in Lucerne.

Riess was a Jewish refugee from Germany who was trusted by Vansittart to aid him in helping to persuade the American public to enter the War against Germany. The book is one of the most astonishing books of its kind ever written, full of breathtaking revelations. It deserves to be widely known and to be a classic text for historical studies.

Its… show more.