On the Other Side--To My Children: From Germany 1940-1945

by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg

Book Overview

On The Other Side is a human document of great historical interest: a cultured, liberal, anti-Nazi woman's account of the day-to-day destruction of the city of Hamburg and its people. This was a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0831766794
• ISBN13: 9780831766795
• Release Date: March 1979
• Publisher: Popular Culture Ink
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Extremely moving and well-edited letters

This book is made up of letters written (but never sent) by a German woman, Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg, the wife of a German teacher in Hamburg, to her children in England from 1940 to 1945. I found myself much caught up by this very personal and absorbingly interesting account of living in wartime Germany. Conditions seemed to get worse after the war ended, altho then at least the bombing was over. It is a much less detailed account than Victor Klemperer gives in the second volume of his I Will Bear Witness, also an account of life in wartime Germany, but that is told from the perspective of a Protestant of Jewish ancestry, whereas this book has no didactic purpose--it is just made up of letters composed periodically by a mother to her children. But I found this unpretentious book absorbing in a way different from the Klemperer volumes. I cannot recommend it too highly for one interested in the experience of Germans while the war was going on.