David Cesarani
Frau Führer
Eva Braun: Life with Hitler
By Heike B Görtemaker (Translated by Damion Searls)
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 321pp £25 order from our bookshop
In Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall Juliane Köhler plays Eva Braun as an irrepressibly vivacious blonde, grabbing a cigarette between bombardments in mischievous defiance of Hitler, but standing by her Führer until she courageously shares his end. Like the other women in the bunker, apart from the evil Magda Goebbels, she is portrayed as essentially innocent. But was Eva a victim of circumstances? Was her fate determined by Nazi ideas about gender or was she a willing collaborator?
In unravelling the enigma of Eva Braun, Heike Görtemaker goes beyond biography and has interesting things to say about women in Nazi ideology and Hitler’s personal rule. But first she has to disentangle what we know about Eva’s life from the self-serving accounts written, in the most part, by survivors
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf