Frederick Taylor
Inside the Nightmare
On the Other Side: Letters to My Children from Germany 1940–46
By Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg
Persephone Books 205pp £10 order from our bookshop
Mathilde (‘Tilli’) Wolff-Mönckeberg (1879–1958) was born and died in Hamburg, and experienced the best and worst that the twentieth century had to offer. The patrician Mönckebergs were prominent in the life of Germany’s greatest trading city (an entry in her mother’s diary for one day during the 1890s, when Tilli’s father was First Burgomaster, shows Prince Bismarck expected for lunch and Johannes Brahms for dinner) and typified the industrious, cosmopolitan virtues that reigned unchallenged in Hamburg for centuries.
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