Introducing the New Texts

The Past is Myself Christabel Bielenberg

This memoir begins in the German Embassy in London in the afternoon of September 29th, 1934 when 22 year old Christabel Bielenberg exchanged her British passport for its German equivalent. She had, just that morning, married Peter Bielenberg, a Hamburg law student. It ends in the Bavarian village of Rohrbach on May 2nd, 1945 with liberation and the collapse of the Third Reich. This little village had become the place of safety for Christabel and her children and the hiding place of her husband from the Nazis.

This is a humane and moving book. Both the events and the moral issues will provoke thoughtful discussion among adolescent readers. The author is an intelligent observer of a calamitous period in German history. Christabel Bielenberg was a rare kind of eye-witness; one who had the detachment of the foreigner and the engagement of a wife and mother who had a personal stake in this morally crumbling society. This gives her narrative its particular intensity, integrity and sometimes chilling quality when describing the terrifying impact of fascist policies on everyday life.

Many of the narratives on our prescribed list have complex time schemes. This one is very simple and chronological. She names chapters by date and event, beginning with "The Years Before (1932-1934) and concluding with "The End (Spring 1945).

The story offers quite a detailed historical and social documentary in an easy conversational style. The growing anti-Semitism of the early 30s is conveyed in a myriad of small neighbourhood, local and national incidents. The Nazi presence and its hold on the media strengthened in the years when their two sons, Nicky and John were born, 1935 and 1936. Jewish friends began to emigrate or mysteriously disappear, and in 1938, Peter was called up to the German Air force. This was the year of Kristallnacht when synagogues went up in flames and Jewish business premises were destroyed in a night of unprecedented terror. 1939 then brought the British declaration of war with the Bielenbergs now living in Berlin.

The war years brought rationing, hardship, phone-tapping and a feeling of being spied upon by zealous neighbours. One of the most moving stories of those years is of the appeal made by a Jewish woman to Christabel one evening early in 1943. Jews who had gone under-ground were without rations, shelter or means of keeping alive. In spite of all wise advice and her fears for her army officer husband and her children, she decided to hide the woman and her husband in the cellar of her home. The incident encap-sulates the terrible moral dilemmas faced by individuals in time of war or tyranny and is very honestly and vividly portrayed.

With the birth of a third son, they decide to move to the relative safety of the Black forest, away from the fear of bombing raids on Berlin.

In the summer of 1943, we decided that the children should not go through another winter in Berlin. Our third son Christopher had been born in 1942, and although I had become an ardent supporter of the black market, throughout the following year the food situation worsened month by month. Also when the nights grew longer we knew that we could reckon once more with the British air-raids.

1942 was a bleak year. Friends of the Bielenbergs began to be arrested in Berlin and taken for questioning in Gestapo headquarters and the bombing barrage on the city was in full force. In describing her experience of it, she portrays the terror inflicted on the civilian population and the brutal, random senselessness of war,

The bombs fell indiscriminately on Nazis and anti-Nazis, on women and children and works of art, on dogs and pet canaries. New and more ravaging bombs - blockbusters and incendiaries, and phosphorous bombs which burst and glowed green and emptied themselves down the walls and along the streets in flaming rivers of unquenchable flame, seeping down cellar stairs, and sealing the exits to the air-raid shelters.

Following the July Plot and the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, Peter Bielenberg and many of his friends were arrested. He was sent to Ravensbruck where his wife visited him in December 1944. In an astonishing move, Christabel then decided to voluntarily offer a Gestapo interrogation in order to try for his release. This interview provides one of the book's many interesting dialogues. Through flattery, a show of naïveté, and playing up her Irish rather than English connections, she succeeded in persuading her interrogator that she and Peter had no political beliefs and no resistance to Hitler or the Reich.

There are countless poignant moments in this book; such as the author's brief encounter in the winter of 1944 with a German mother trying to locate her evacuated children before the Russian troops move in on Leipzig. They are standing on a railway platform,

She asked me if I knew whether trains were still going to Leipzig -two of her children had been evacuated there with their school and she was hoping to find them before the Russian wave went over them. I found myself battling with black despair.

Many significant moments like this one remind us of the universality of human suffering as societies disintegrate in the aftermath of war.

This memoir explores themes of love, friendship, loyalty, war and human behaviour under extreme duress. When Christabel Bielenberg first published "The Past is Myself" in 1968, race was not an issue in Irish society. The Irish scene has changed and this book is now more relevant and thought-provoking for our young readers than in previous decades.

'This autobiography is of exceptional distinction and importance.
It deserves recognition as a magnificent contribution to international understanding and as a document of how the human spirit can triumph
in the midst of evil and persecution'
Economist

'Marvellously written'
Observer

'Nothing but superlatives will do for this book. It tells its story magnificently and every page of its story is worth telling'
Irish Times

'Humane and beautifully written'
Independent