Weekly Book Discussion Rebecca Donner ” All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days”

This program is geared for educators, but open to all.(Act 48 credit hours or a letter of participation is available upon request.)

The book discussions will be offered on the following dates and times:

January 4, 2022 | 4:00-5:00pm
January 11, 2022 | 4:00-5:00pm
January 18, 2022 | 4:00-5:00pm
About The Book

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment–a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.

Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

Dr. Josh Andy

Dr. Josh Andy is a full time teacher at Winchester Thurston School, and an educational programs leader and Holocaust scholar with Classrooms Without Borders. An accomplished and award winning educator, Dr. Andy holds a Ph.D. in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University and teaches in the Upper School. In addition to teaching Genocide and Holocaust Studies, he teaches a course on the modern Middle East, Multicultural America, and AP European history. Next year he will teach Russian history. He has traveled internationally to study global cultures and issues as part of his work to design engaging courses for his students. He earned WT’s Mary Houston Griffin Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014, which funded his trip to Amman, Jordan, to develop his Middle East course.

About the Author Rebecca Donner

Rebecca Donner is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, published by Little, Brown in the US and Canongate in the UK. A Hebrew translation is forthcoming from Matar Publishing in Israel.

Born in Canada, Donner was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. She is the author of Sunset Terrace, a critically acclaimed novel, and Burnout, a graphic novel about ecoterrorism. Her essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Bookforum.

Rebecca Donner was recently shortlisted for a Fulbright Award. She was a 2018-19 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York, is a two-time Yaddo fellow, and has twice been awarded fellowships by Ucross Foundation. She has also held residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Donner is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught writing at Wesleyan University, Columbia University, and Barnard College.