Shop - THE BOHEMIANS : The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against The Nazis

View All Photos
Norman Ohler – THE BOHEMIANS : The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against The Nazis
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO

THE BOHEMIANS : The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against The Nazis

Norman Ohler
LIKE NEW, PAPERBACK

RM22.00

A Historical Love Story With Incredible Bravery And Self-Sacrifice Trying to Bring Down The Third Reich

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780358508625
Book Condition LIKE NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Mariner Books;
Publication Date 13 July , 2021
Pages 320
Weight 0.34 kg
Dimension 20.5 × 13.5 × 2.5 cm
Retail Price RM76.62
Availability: 1 in stock

Additional information

1 in stock

SHARE:
  • Detail Description

Description

From the New York Times best-selling author of Blitzed, the incredible true story of two idealistic young lovers who led the anti-Nazi resistance in the darkening heart of Berlin
 
The German writer Norman Ohler begins “The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis” with a powerful scene from his own life that perfectly encapsulates the guilt, grief, anger and remorse that have haunted so many of us.
 
Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet—and one of history’s greatest conspiracies is born.
 
Harro Schulze-Boysen already had shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascist fighters that stretched across Berlin’s bohemian underworld. Harro himself infiltrated German intelligence and began funneling Nazi battle plans to the Allies, including the details of Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union.


But nothing could prepare Harro and Libertas for the betrayals they would suffer in this war of secrets—a struggle in which friend could be indistinguishable from foe. Drawing on unpublished diaries, letters, and Gestapo files, Norman Ohler spins an unforgettable tale of love, heroism, and sacrifice in The Bohemians.
 
In Short , Norman Ohler’s The Bohemians brings to light two fascinating figures in Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance movement, Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Haas-Heye. The two lovers began a passionate courtship in 1934 that soon led to a very unconventional marriage. As a student activist, Harro had long been a vocal critic of the Nazi party, and his outspoken dissent had caused him to be imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis for a brief time. Undeterred by his horrific treatment, he resolved to bring the Nazi Party down.
 
As a member of Germany’s Air Force ministry, he funneled air strike plans to the Allies, and later was a key source of information surrounding Nazi atrocities to the Allies. He and Libertas quickly became key figures in the resistance movement, strategizing methods of amplifying the message of the resistance movement and bolstering support among their myriad networks, chiefly in the Bohemian community.
 
Ohler’s The Bohemians is a rigorously researched account of Harro and Libetras’ dazzling lifestyle, transporting the reader from glittering cocktail parties in Berlin to clandestine Resistance meetings. Ohler’s work has been showered with praise, with The New York Times Book Review calling The Bohemians “a detailed and meticulously researched tale… that reads like a thriller.”
 
As a 12-year-old, Ohler asks his beloved grandfather, his “Pa,” about his role in the war. Then an engineer, now a frail old man, he describes seeing SS guards, a freight train and then a child’s hand through a crack in the train car’s boards. But the grandfather does nothing. “I was scared of the SS,” he helplessly explains. Young Ohler is stunned, and in that moment of “stillness you could hear,” he cannot contain his hatred for his Pa.
 
Best known in Germany as a novelist, Ohler is also the author of “Blitzed,” a controversial 2017 best seller about rampant drug use in the Third Reich. With the opening scene of “The Bohemians,” another work of nonfiction, he masterfully establishes his trustworthiness as a narrator, which is crucial as we travel with him back to the 1930s and then on through the war.
 
He weaves a detailed and meticulously researched tale about a pair of young German resisters that reads like a thriller but is supported by 20 pages of footnotes. “I find it particularly important in this case, where the truth has been distorted many times,” he writes, “not to add another legend but to report as accurately as possible, combining my skills as a storyteller with the responsibility of the historian.”
 
The story he reconstructs is that of Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, drawing on letters, articles, diaries and interviews to acquaint us with the couple in all their complexity — engaging, bold and flawed. Harro, originally a student activist, underground writer and publisher, and eventually an employee of the German Air Ministry, is the pair’s intellectual driving force.
 
He is ambitious and stoic, an idealist. Libertas is more whimsical, and also initially a Nazi Party member. She dreams of being a poet and is working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when she first encounters Harro. Her decision to resist seems to be based more on circumstance than principle, but she is deeply resourceful and loyal. We feel the couple’s triumphs intimately and, as the net tightens around them, their sorrows.
 
Young, passionate and liberal, they defy the regime with their unconventional lifestyle — including an open marriage and love of wild gatherings bringing together people of diverse backgrounds and political leanings.
 
And, more dangerously, they pass on information about Nazi atrocities to enemies of the Reich, support Jews, produce pamphlets and establish links with Soviet intelligence. At a time when, as Ohler puts it, “propaganda and suppression increasingly dominate daily life” and “culture is being destroyed,” they cut remarkable figures.
 
For decades, Ohler writes, historians were reluctant to carry out a “genuine investigation” of the couple’s anti-Nazi circle. It was widely believed that German resistance spread little beyond the White Rose and the Stauffenberg plot. For political reasons, both East and West Germany subsequently sought to erase from history details of the brave resistance work of Libertas and Harro and their group.
 
Family and friends were silenced, and in both East and West Libertas and Harro were posthumously lionized as Soviet spies. The reality was more subtle and fraught. Theirs is a tragic tale of defiance, espionage, love and betrayal.
 
Ohler employs the present tense throughout, imbuing his account with a sense of urgency and reminding us that the past in many ways remains our present. His only deviation into the past tense is in the foreword, where he discloses his grandfather’s agonized recollection — a failure to act for which the resistance narrative of “The Bohemians” serves as a kind of atonement.
 
———————————————————
KIRKUS REVIEW :
 
The story of a valiant group of resisters who stealthily undermined the Nazi regime.
 
Drawing on a trove of unpublished and archival documents from the German Resistance Memorial Center, the Institute for Contemporary History, and German, British, Russian, and American national repositories, screenwriter, novelist, and journalist Ohler creates a taut, absorbing tale of anti-Nazi resistance.
 
Told in the present tense, the narrative conveys a sense of immediacy and encroaching terror. Central to the history are Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife, Libertas, an attractive bourgeois couple, “apparently ‘Aryan’ through and through,” who become the vortex for a daring movement. Harro began as an idealistic publisher of the Gegner, a prominent journal dedicated to raising consciousness about threats to society from the rise of Nazism.
 
“A people divided by hate…cannot get up again,” Harro wrote in one piece. He felt optimistic that Hitler would fail and that Germans’ enthusiasm for the Nazis could be directed “toward a genuine social revolution.” After he was arrested and tortured for his activities, however, Harro was forced to adopt a new strategy: “to appear outwardly unsuspicious in order to change the system from within.”
 
To further that strategy, he enlisted in the air force. Libertas, a publicist for MGM and a member of the Nazi Party, radically changed her “immature, Nazi-oriented worldview” after falling in love with Harro, soon becoming a valued, if sometimes erratic, member of their “social network,” which spread and surfaced, focused in part on printing and disseminating pamphlets and flyers.
 
Harro, whose military position put him “at a nexus of information of the German war machine,” had a vital role in producing documents with which to “flood the country with sensitive information about how the war is going and bring about a popular revolt.” Ohler capably recounts the intrepid activities, alliances, and betrayals that led to sweeping arrests and executions.
 
Sharply drawn characters enliven a tragic history.
 
—————————————————
About the Author :
 
NORMAN OHLER is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed, as well as the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, and Stadt des Goldes (translated into English as Ponte City). He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’s film Palermo Shooting. He lives in Berlin.
[ --- Read more --- ]
You've just added this product to the cart: