“I am English;  I was German, and above all I was there.”

–Christabel Bielenburg

For some unknown reason, these days, I’m fascinated by Germany in the late 1930s. How did people deal with what was happening around them? Did they see the emergence of the Third Reich? Or were they blind, willfully or otherwise? Christabel Bielenburg’s memoir,  The Past is Myself is a great read, or in my case re-read, for anyone who is in a similar mood.

Bielenberg was a privileged Anglo-Irish young woman training to be an opera singer when she met Peter, a dashing young German lawyer. They married and settled in Germany. In 1934. She took on German citizenship and stayed there throughout the war. Her perspective as someone caught between two warring nations results in a fascinating memoir, telling the tale of all the Germans who were not captivated by Hitler, but needed to survive under his regime.  Her friends and acquaintances ranged from Adam Von Trott, who was executed for his role in the July Plot to assassinate the Chancellor, to her neighbours in the Black Foret Village, whose took a more passive approach in their resistance.

Throughout the book, Bielenburg struggles with the need to survive under the brutally repressive system while maintaining some sense of integrity. She wonders how even smart and moral people were drawn to Hitler, and tries to understand where their support came from. She concludes that HItler’s best tactic was his ability to instil a feeling of belonging in those who had been missing it for so long. Back in the last century, when I first read this book, that was one of my key take-aways.

This time, the thing that struck me about Bielenburg’s account is the persistent feeling of exhaustion that permeates most of her wartime interactions. At one point, she is alone on a train with an SS officer who tells her how difficult it was to kill Jews, but finds herself nodding off and unable to focus on the horror of the man’s words. On a broader scale, she is simply too tired to dig deeply into the atrocities that were going on around her. Like many Germans, even “good” ones, she found it all too much to bear.

Bielenburg does overcome her tiredness to shelter two Jews, even though she is already an object of suspicion by the authorities. She also goes to Gestapo headquarters to argue for Peter’s innocence when he is arrested due to his association with von Trott, and secures his transfer from Ravensbruck concentration camp to a mine-clearing detail.

Above all else, The Past is Myself is a story of survival, and suggests that her exhaustion was part of what allowed her to survive. It let her carry on without facing the fact that the Jews she sheltered were caught and executed soon after. She shows how it can be essential, not just convenient or comfortable, to avoid dwelling on the horrible facts.