Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.548147
EAN: 9780394757773
ISBN: 0394757777
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 1988-06-12
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1988-06-12
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944 and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture of wartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20th of July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill Hitler -- was born.
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A different WWII perspective
Comment: (4.5 stars)
This book is quite unlike the typical WWII-era memoir which most folks are used to. The most obvious difference is that Missie is an exiled Russian princess, and not some ordinary citizen or refugee in Germany and Austria. She also wrote her diaries in English instead of in German or Russian, so she's really not a full part of the society she's living in. In spite of the differing perspective, the story is very riveting and well-told. Gaps in the narrative are filled in by editorial comments by Missie's brother George, letters she wrote and sent during the missing periods, and reminiscences from Missie, friends, and relatives years later. For someone who isn't well-versed in WWII history, the editorial comments will be very helpful, such as details of the infamous massacre at Katyn, or more information about some battle or event that's only alluded to.
Though she is immune to the suffering and deprivations of the ordinary people around her in the beginning, by 1943 Missie and her circle of friends and relatives start to feel the heat. The Allied bombings raids on Berlin didn't make a distinction between commoners and nobility, and food and fuel shortages affected everyone. Because of her association with a few people involved in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler, Missie eventually has to get out of Berlin, eventually making her way into Vienna, where she works as a nurse for most of the duration of the war. Deprivations and bombing raids continue in Vienna, though, and as the war nears its final days, she once again is faced with the necessity of escaping to a safer locale. Not only is it imperative that she get out of the way of the fighting, but she also doesn't want to be discovered by the Red Army, as she is a White Russian.
While it's always difficult to make value judgments on someone's journal, since we can't put ourselves in that person's footsteps, and because this person probably never dreamt it would be published, I did get the sense that a few other reviewers did, that there's a seeming indifference to the fate of the ordinary people around her. While Europe is going up in flames, Missie, her friends, and her family are still going to parties, hob-nobbing with royalty and nobility, driving around in cars, drinking champagne, using perfume, having strings pulled for them so they can have nice jobs, saving ridiculous luxury items, and staying in castles and manors. Even when the war finally catches up to even the nobility, she still has all of these powerful connections who can get her exit passes, travel permits, castles and estates to escape to, jobs to be accepted at, and cars and trains to flee in.
Ordinary Europeans often had to escape on foot and drag their necessary possessions in carts, were left homeless, couldn't turn their noses up at horse meat if that were their only food available, didn't have powerful connections to save them from harm and grant them safe passage through dangerous territory, and cared more about escaping with their lives, the clothes on their backs, and a few needed items, instead of rejoicing that some Count friend of theirs managed to save something stupid like fur coats and artwork in his automobile. And while the selling point of the book is that Missie was intimately involved in the July 20 plot, I didn't see more than superficial circumstantial evidence for that. She was friends with some of the plotters and tried to get some of them out of jail, but other than that, there isn't any compelling proof that she knew way more than she was telling. That isn't even the main focus of the book. And since there are so many people moving in Missie's circle, it's sometimes hard to remember who's who.
Overall, though, it is a very interesting book for anyone who's interested in a different perspective of WWII, or who's interested in the White Russian experience abroad. Obviously it's not Missie's fault that she was born into nobility and could have all of these wartime luxuries and safety nets that ordinary people could only dream of.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good on the devastation caused by Allied bombings, not so good on the plot against Hitler
Comment: It feels cruel to be overly critical about this book because I can't imagine the author wrote entries in her diary with the thought that they would one day be published. She finds herself in Berlin at the time the Allied bombing raids are really picking up and describes very well how hard daily life was at a time when whole sections of the city were being pulverised. She also happens to be working for a part of the government alongside some of those who plotted against Hitler and tried to assassinate him in 1944. Her involvement in this is never more than casual and it's a sign of her lack of importance that she is never arrested or interrogated. Unlike most of the people around her she is also able to flee Berlin to stay in various friends' castles and country estates when life in the capital becomes too tough. She also attends many, many parties hosted by diplomats and other members of the gilded set. This is an interesting book, but not rivetting.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "I CANNOT LISTEN TO THIS ANYMORE"
Comment: Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945 by Marie Vassilchikov (New York: Knopf, 1987)
This review has been published in a collection of reviews and articles, That's What I'm Talking About (Nativa 2008).THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT
"29 January, 1940 . . . My office does not seem to know who its Top Boss is, as everybody is giving orders at the same time, although the Reich's Propaganda Minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, is said to have the last word" (page 5).
Diaries can be a valuable antidote to the treacheries of memory and the self-interest of hindsight. But the trouble is, many such journals are boring. Plus, many important events unfold without the benefit of the keen-eyed and conscientious diarist. One such compulsive diarist was Marie Vassilehikov (1917-1978), daughter of a minor Russian nobleman, whose family was evicted from Russia in 1919 and who found herself trapped in Hitler's Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War. Her journal has recently been published as Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945. This document, edited after her death by her brother George, is of great importance.
Brilliant, multilingual, independent, and with an eye for the telling detail, "Missie" worked for several German propaganda and information offices throughout the war. She typed many of her observations in English during office hours and concealed the pages first in file cabinets and later in various spots in and around Berlin.
Missie's diary provides an eyewitness account of the Allied bombing of Berlin, which was undertaken in retaliation for an accidental German bombing of London on August 24, 1940. From the diary: "10 October, 1940 . . . This evening I was at a party when the alarm sounded. The shooting was very loud and poor Maxchen Kieckebusch, whose nerves have gone to pieces since he was injured in the spine in France, rolled on the floor moaning, Ich kann das nicht mehr Horen [I cannot listen to this anymore] over and over again" (p. 32).
We read of the disintegration of the matrix of ordinary life: an elderly postman dies and is laid out for a week on the kitchen table before being taken away. At one end of the table near the feet of the corpse, sandwiches are prepared and given to a rescue party looking for persons alive under the rubble of the latest Allied bombing. Before the end of the war all the gravediggers had been called into the army. Relatives had to bury their dead in cardboard coffins.
How important is this book? From it we learn much about aristocratic Germans who detested Hitler and who conspired to kill him. Successive plots were discussed and planned, and at least one was bravely and naively attempted; a suitcase fined with explosives was planted in Hitler's underground headquarters. With the failure of this attempt, the most active conspirators were rounded up, together with their families, associates, and acquaintances.
Unbelievably, the conspirators had made long lists of those who would be invited to join the post-Hitler German government. The discovery of these lists led to the arrest and execution of more than eleven thousand persons in 1944 and the first five months of 1945. The theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was among these last. Several conspirators escaped Nazi detection only to be captured by the advancing Red Army. They disappeared forever in the Russian Gulag.
Missie was informed of the conspiracy to execute Hitler and may have given more to the various plots than just her sympathy. Her diary of these events is the only firsthand account known to exist. It astonishes that a Russian woman living in Berlin and identified with anti-Hitler conspirators, somehow avoided suspicion, arrest, and execution. Her diary is a rare and remarkable document.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Excellent , Varied Perspective
Comment: Having read countless histories and memoirs from this period, I found this book helped color yet another perspective. I was engrossed. I have done much reading on both the Kreisau Circle and the 20th July Plot, and was fascinated at how Missy's memoirs tied up some loose ends on the subject. This is a wonderful addition to the library of anyone who is a student of this particular era.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Elegant Scrounger
Comment: Following the collapse of the Romanov Empire (Russia), the Hapsburg Empire (Austria) and the Hohenzollern Empire (Germany) in the wake of World War I, Europe was overrun by aristocratic refugees. Some of them had family fortunes commensurate with their impressive titles, others did not.
One of these impoverished, but well-educated young aristocrats was Princess Marie Vassiltchikov, who was in her early 20s when she and her sister moved to Germany hunting for jobs. Both found employment despite their non-German status, but it was tenuous for young anti-Communist Russians, especially when Stalin agreed to a non-agression pact with Hitler and happily carved up Poland and the Baltic states, including Lithuania in which Marie and her family had taken refuge from the Bolsheviks.
Yes, she is aristocratic. Yes, she is beautiful and yes, she is generally broke, cold and hungry. Her looks and her family connections provide a safety net of sorts, and as food supplies shrink Marie's diary begins to resemble an extended food quest, typical of anybody who's hungry. She manages to acquire a modest, but apparently elegant wardrobe and admits to gorging herself at parties when the opportunity arises.
Like any beautiful, young woman, she comments on the young men (many of whom are also aristocrats) and how attractive they are (or aren't.) Sometimes her blueblood works for her. Sometimes it works against her. During 1944, for example, the official SS journal (DAS SCHWARZE KORPS/THE BLACK CORPS) rails against "blaublutige Schweinehunde and Verrater"/ "blue-blooded piggish-dogs and traitors" who'd conspired to assassinate Hitler. Yet, the leader of the dreaded SS, Heinrich Himmler, continued to revel in his tenuous connection with the royal family of Bavaria, one of whom was his god-father.
These were dangerous times for bluebloods like Marie and she survived. Not only that, she left some great descriptions of the inner workings of the Third Reich, the July 20th plot and impact of strategic bombing by the Allies.
She doesn't moralize or engage in self pity. She copes, eats when she can, and finds shelter wherever its available. She uses the connections she has and she survives.
Her diaries are straightforward accounts of a critical period in world history. She is not a model 21st century progressive, but neither were most of those who conspired to murder Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters in 1944. Some were unregenerate Monarchists and Prussian Junkers intent on regaining lost status and privileges.
Her diaries and her situation are difficult for a lot of contemporary American readers to fully understand. A Princess, after all, should be wealthy as well as beautiful. The "People's Princess" (HRH Diana Spencer)is the archetypical blueblood for most Americans. While Princess Marie had the requisite elegant good looks, she lacked the money and power most of us expect royals to have.
We forget, or never realized, that Europe during the 1920s and 1930s included lots of people with very impressive titles, good educations and aristocratic bearing, but little or no money. Being a Princess from an empire which no longer existed might get you invited to parties, especially if you're beautiful, but it didn't pay rent or put schnitzel (even the schnitzel made from dead donkeys) on the table.
I liked Marie and her diaries and found a number of interesting insights and facts I didn't know about this period in history. If you keep in mind the totality of circumstances which formed her perceptions, her diaries can provide some interesting and unique insights into this tumultuous period of history.
I recommend the diaries and gave it five stars.
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