The attractions and the moods of personality too. You can feel the power threats, and the tension in the room. The reader gets a seat in the boarding house at the dining room table for the breakfast meal, for the evening meal. Who is a peer? Who is apolitical? Who is lovable? And far more than all of that, who is trustworthy to plain everyday conversations.Įveryday life is particular of moment to moment placements in this household. But within the individual's gut feelings for such exchanges which clearly conflict? Are you "allowed" to say your feelings aren't meshing with "our values"? And also in who/which of closest in-house associate and friendship might be paving the path to your relocation or to your seduction. in some kind of equity while being told that "our values" toward collective progress are these exact sets of particular somethings. Dangerous, dangerous times to disagree with the "correct" values and when individuals needed to exchange goods, duties, work etc. Also holds one of those "afterwards" epilogue reviews as the ending which is looking back 50 years later with the "facts" of outcomes for a dozen or two individuals within the 1938 action.
This one isn't as Berlin identified as the Station books, nor is it as complex for length and intersects but it's very nearly a 5 star book nevertheless. IMHO, no one does the 20 years before Hitler within Germany as David Downing. The exception that makes the dirge mood pile of current mounds of WWII era books look and read like the pap of sentimentality tracts which most of them are.
But as he grows close to the Gersdorffs, accidentally stepping into the role of the father Walter never had, Hofmann begins to wish for another kind of hope in his life. He always knew his mission would most likely end in his death, and he was satisfied to make that sacrifice for the revolution if it could help stop Hitler and his abominable ideology. Posing as a railroad man, Hofmann sets out on his game of “Russian roulette,” approaching Hamm’s ex-party members one at a time and delicately feeling out their allegiances. Hofmann’s bosses believe the common workers are the only way to stop the German war machine from within. Josef Hofmann was not the returned Argentinian immigrant he’d said he was-he was a communist spy under Moscow’s command to try to reconnect with any remnants of Germany’s suppressed communist party. What Walter finds is a scathing chronicle of one the most tumultuous years in German history, narrated by a secret agent on a deadly mission. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow’s son, who was eleven years old in the spring of 1938, discovers the carefully hidden diary the boarder had kept during his stay, even though he should never have written any of its contents down. In April 1938, a man calling himself Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. From bestselling author David Downing, master of historical espionage, comes a heart-wrenching depiction of Germany in the days leading up to World War II and the difficult choices of one man of conviction.
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