Nigel Jones

Behind the Wire

Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

By

Pimlico 350pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

Although its tragic and harrowing subject matter makes it a daunting read, Under Two Dictators is one of the most significant memoirs of the twentieth century, and remains a wake-up call to anyone who might still fall for the totalitarian temptation in the twenty-first. It should be required reading for any serious student of history and politics.

The author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was born in 1901 to a good bourgeois German family in Potsdam, outside Berlin. Though we learn little of her background and early life from the book, the young Grete Thüring – as she was before her marriage – seems to have suffered the typical Prussian curse of a harshly authoritarian father; she received more understanding from her liberal mother.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us