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Rebecca Donner


All the Frequent Troubles Bio Media & Book Clubs Articles Events Books Contact




New York Times bestselling author


Rebecca Donner

All the Frequent TroublesBioMedia & Book ClubsArticlesEventsBooksContact


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Book trailer for All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.

The National Arts Club in New York City hosts a virtual event with Rebecca
Donner.

Rebecca Donner talks about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack’s role in the
underground resistance at a virtual event hosted by the Museum of Jewish
Heritage.

The historian David Clay Large interviews Rebecca Donner at a virtual event
hosted by the Free Library of Philadelphia.


INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER


WINNER, NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD


WINNER, PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD


WINNER, THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE

ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled
in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party.
As early as 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small
band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground
resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the
resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in
writing leaflets that denounced Hitler's regime. Her coconspirators circulated
through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes,
public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War
were fired she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies.
On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi
military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison
camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February
16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of
the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown
until now.

Harnack’s great-grand-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival
research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered
documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative
nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and
scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary
entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, testimony of survivors, and a
trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story,
reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

> An Instant New York Times Bestseller
> Winner, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
> Winner, PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
> Winner, The Chautauqua Prize
> A New York Times Notable Book
> A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
> A New York Times Book Review Critics’ Top Book of the Year
> A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
> A TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of the Year
> The Economist’s Best Book of the Year
> A New York Post Best Book of the Yeare
> An Oprah Daily Best New Book of August
> A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
> A New York Public Library Book of the Week
> A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year
> A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of the Year
> A Barnes & Noble Best Audiobook of the Year

> “Astonishing…wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography….[an]
> extraordinarily intimate book… Donner is Harnack’s great-great-niece, so this
> is a family history too. It is also a story of code names and dead drops, a
> real-life thriller with a cruel ending — not to mention an account of Hitler’s
> ascent from attention-seeking buffoon to genocidal Führer….Donner’s decision
> to narrate events in the present tense [is] an effective device for conveying
> what it felt like in real time to experience the tightening vise of the Nazi
> regime.” – Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
> 
> "Rebecca Donner has written a beautifully rich portrait of a very brave woman.
> While never less than scrupulously researched, this biography explodes the
> genre of 'biography': experimental but achieved, Donner's story reads with the
> speed of a thriller, the depth of a novel, and the urgency of an essay, like
> some deeply compelling blend of Alan Furst and W.G. Sebald." – JAMES WOOD
> 
> “A gorgeous collage of history and family lore, a revelatory window onto a
> Götterdämmerung that transformed the world forever.” – Oprah Daily, named a
> Best New Book of August
> 
> A stunning literary achievement. Rebecca Donner forges a new kind of
> biography—almost novelistic in style and tone, this scholarly work resurrects
> the courageous life of Mildred Harnack. A relentless sleuth in the archives,
> Donner has written a page-turner story of espionage, love and betrayal. – KAI
> BIRD, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography
> 
> “This is a powerful book. A nonfiction narrative with the pace of a political
> thriller, it’s imbued with suspense and dread.” – The Wall Street Journal
> 
> “Donner recreates her great-great-aunt’s epic tale in a gorgeous collage of
> history and family lore, a revelatory window onto a Götterdämmerung that
> transformed the world forever.” – Oprah Daily, named a Best New Book of August
> 
> “A tour de force of investigation… The story unfolds in fragments… but as the
> pieces cohere, the couple’s story becomes gripping… The abiding impression is
> of virtuous, extraordinarily brave people caught up in tragic horror.”– The
> Economist
> 
> “Rebecca Donner’s passionate, page-turning book, “All the Frequent Troubles of
> Our Days”...melds history and biography. She brings forensic and literary
> skills — along with access to family papers and a key witness — to a story at
> once deeply personal and broadly inspiring” – The Boston Globe
> 
> All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days sets the remarkable story of resistance
> fighter Mildred Harnack against the backdrop of daily life in Germany as
> Hitler tightened his grip. Epic in sweep, written with a novelist’s attention
> to detail and a historian’s perspective on social and political forces, this
> book opens up new possibilities for biography. – RUTH FRANKLIN, winner of the
> NBCC Award for Biography, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
> 
> Combining meticulous scholarship and sparkling narrative brio, Rebecca
> Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days brings to life for the first
> time the central role played by Mildred Harnack in Germany’s homegrown
> opposition to Nazi rule. Donner’s portrait of the cruelly oppressive system
> against which Harnack and her circle fought serves to remind us of what can
> happen when, amidst economic insecurity and anguish over dislocating
> socio-cultural change, a highly civilized nation embraces demagoguery over
> democracy. – DAVID CLAY LARGE, author of Berlin
> 
> How can it happen that a constitution, a free press, and a democracy be
> demolished — all within six months? This powerfully written story of Mildred
> Harnack, resistance fighter against Hitler, tells step by step the way the
> German republic fell to the Nazis. Read All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,
> and be warned. – MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, winner of the National Book Award,
> author of The Woman Warrior
> 
> “Donner quotes passages from her sources at length, letting the reader dwell
> on facts rather than galloping through them. She does this stylishly,
> sometimes presenting events in chronological lists or highlighting fragments
> from her research as stand-alone text. The archival quality of the book, its
> enumeration and cataloging of sources, is both surprising for a biography —
> too rarely the site of literary innovation — and affecting.” – Madeleine
> Schwartz, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
> 
> “It’s against a tense backdrop of political terror that we recognise Mildred’s
> extraordinary bravery. This is a superb, sure-footed work of historical
> detection conceived with a powerful intelligence.” – The Sunday Times
> 
> “Despite its ostensibly forbidding subject matter this is a thrilling and
> inspiring book...a treasure trove for lovers of biography, new writing and the
> history of the Third Reich.” – The Scotsman
> 
> "[A] stunning biography...Donner’s research is impeccable, and her fluid prose
> and vivid character sketches keep the pages turning.” – Publishers Weekly
> (starred review)
> 
> “Donner has clearly worked hard in East German, Soviet, and recently released
> American archives to tell an impressive story.” – Kirkus Reviews
> 
> “Donner’s meticulous research and novelist’s sensibility make for a riveting
> biography of a remarkable and brave woman.” – Library Journal

 

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Rebecca DonnerAll The Frequent Troubles of Our Days