About this lecture
The Center for the Study of Women and Society and Women Writing Women's Lives present the Dorothy O. Helly Works-in-Progress Lecture “Mildred Harnack and the German Resistance to Hitler” by Rebecca Donner. This event is free and open to the public, but click here to Register and for access to the Zoom link.
Rebecca Donner will discuss the challenges in writing All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, a work of narrative nonfiction about her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, the only American in the leadership of Berlin’s underground resistance during the Nazi regime. She will speak about the often-lost narrative of women in the German resistance and her archival discoveries as she set out to fuse elements of biography, political thriller, and scholarly detective story, interweaving letters, diaries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, testimony of survivors, and declassified intelligence documents to reconstruct the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.
Rebecca Donner’s essays and reportage have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Bookforum. She is the author of Burnout, a graphic novel about ecoterrorism, and Sunset Terrace, a critically acclaimed novel. She was a 2018-2019 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and is a two-time Yaddo fellow. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days will be published in 2021 by Little, Brown in the US and Canongate in the UK.
Co-sponsored with The Center for the Humanities, The Feminist Press, The Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Graduate Center MA Program in Biography and Memoir, MA Program in Liberal Studies, and the PhD Programs in History and English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
