My project this year is to learn more about World War 2. That includes learning about the cultural environment around the war, including fiction works that deal with it directly or indirectly. I'm interested not only in the facts of what happened but in how ordinary people thought, felt and acted; the long-term societal changes; global and local culture shifts. Both fiction and non-fiction recs welcome, looking for unique perspectives and "underrated" picks.
Here's what I've got on my reading list and/or have already read, to give an idea of what I'm looking for:
- A Small Town in Germany, John Le Carré
- Soldaten, Sönke Neitzel & Harald Welzer
- Various memoirs / diaries (Henry Channon, Duff Cooper, Heinz Schmidt, etc)
- The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Italo Calvino
- Rise & Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer (this is about as deep into "facts and dates" as I want to go)
- The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang (ditto above)
- Judgement at Tokyo, Gary Bass
I do not want recs for:
- Books about the Holocaust, D-Day, conspiracies against the Nazis, the Manhattan Project (I know how to find those)
- Biographies of top Axis/Allied leaders or otherwise "famous" people (eg Bonhoeffer)
- Fiction written after 1980 (this date is arbitrary; I might be swayed with a strong argument, but I am not interested in books like for ex The Book Thief)
Academic texts OK.
by MaximumAsparagus
11 Comments
Eight Bailed Out (if you can find it).
We Are At War by Simon Garfield features real diary excerpts from 5 ordinary British people living through WWII.
If you’re open to TV recs as well, see if you can find the BBC series Wartime Farm.
[Last Witnesses](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42963288-last-witnesses): An Oral History of the Children of World War II – Svetlana Alexievitch.
*”Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation.*
*Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war. Alexievich gives voice to those whose memories have been lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history from the personal and private experiences of individuals.”*
Just a wee warning up front – her books are amazing, really really amazing, but they are a difficult read. Her book [War’s unwomanly face](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025275-war-s-unwomanly-face) is also an amazing read and also seems relevant to your topic.
*”Soviet writer of Belarussia, Svetlana Alexiyevich spent four years working on the book, visiting over 100 cities and towns, settlements and villages and recording the stories and reminiscences of women war veterans.”*
**”The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II** by Studs Terkel
Two fiction books that were for all intents and purposes lost to time resurfaced in the 21st century that were written contemporaneously with the events they depict. So the publication date is recent, but the writing in the 30s/40s.
Irene Nemirovsky was a Russian Jew living in Paris when it was taken over by the Nazis. She was part of the mass exodus of people escaping the city and she wrote of that story in Suite Francaise, or at least 2/5 – 3/5 of it. Unfortunately, she didn’t leave far enough outside the Third Reich and was eventually rounded up with her husband and sent to the concentration camps and died.
Her daughters were cared for by friends and nuns, the manuscript of what she wrote locked away for decades unread until rediscovered.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was a German Jew who experienced the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and the antisemitism backlash. He frantically sought a way out of German and did find it. He wrote a Kafkaesque novel called The Passenger about a frantic Jewish man forever traveling on trains to reach asylum, but not being able to get beyond the border. It was published in a small number in England before the war where he was a refugee, but over shadowed by world events and forgotten. He did not get sent to a concentration camp, but didn’t survive the war to an ironic twist of fate.
Both had first hand observations of historical events, which make their stories uniquely placed to capture that in their novels.
One other book to read is a novella length epistolary work by an American writer – Address Unknown. It was published in the 1930s and depicts two German Art dealers, a Jewish man who stays in the US to run the gallery in San Francisc, and another man who returns to Berlin to set up a gallery during the rise of Hitler. He gets turned into a fascist and antisemite despite his close friendship and partnership with Jewish friend.
What’s striking is the level of knowledge the American author Katherine Kressman Taylor had about the sociopolitical landscape of Germany by 1938 to publish this. If she knew what was going on so far removed there is no way those in Germany did not know.
And I highly recommend the NF Eric Larson Book In the Garden of the Beasts, about the US ambassador to Germany who desperately tried to alert the US as to what was going on in German even as his own family members were flirting with Fascism, but to no avail as he was an outsider in the diplomatic core.
Curzio Malaparte, The skin
Absolutely fascinating book: 1st person accounts of ordinary life in Britain during the war, compiled and written in 1970, so it was very clear and distinct in memory. All varieties of people–people who had been children, young marrieds, middle aged, elderly, living in the country, in the cities, etc etc, just a complete tapestry of life for ordinary people during those years. The author’s mother was a Land Girl, IIRC, and he has a LOT to say about how they were treated, rationing, and other policies. It’s just fascinating and vivid and makes the whole period completely come to life. [https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Lived-Then-Everyday-ebook/dp/B0031Y9DQO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0](https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Lived-Then-Everyday-ebook/dp/B0031Y9DQO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0)
Description:
*Although nearly 90% of the population of Great Britain remained civilians throughout the war, or for a large part of it, their story has so far largely gone untold. In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual’s experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned – food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all.*
*This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian’s story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.*
*The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945* by William Sheridan Allen
*The German Opposition to Hitler: The Resistance, the Underground, and Assassination Plots, 1938-1945* by Michael C. Thomsett
*An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945* by Anton Gill
The Liberation Line: The Last Untold Story of the Normandy Landings by Christian Wolmar (about the railway reconstruction crews)
Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II
*The Silver Sword*, by Ian Serrailler (published in the US as *Escape From Warsaw*) is a classic about four Polish children’s struggle to survive, caught between the Nazis, the Red Army and the Americans.
There was a mass observation project in Britain during the war, which recruited normal people to keep diaries and send them in to be kept as national records. Some of them have now been published so the public can read them. *Nella Last’s War*, edited by Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming, is probably the most famous of them (made into the film “Housewife, 49” starring Victoria Wood), but *Mrs Miles’s Diary*, by Constance Miles, is another good read.
On a similar note, while many writers of crime fiction left the war out of their books to provide escapism, I’ve been quite interested by Patricia Wentworth’s casual inclusion of rationing – including the things you don’t think about, like clothing and even yarn for knitting – in her Miss Silver books, and at least two of her wartime/post-war book plots involve people who are reported to have died. *The Chinese Shawl*, *The Key*, and *The Traveller Returns* are worth dipping into for the sense of the period (she wrote other titles during that period, but I’m only listing three for brevity because they cover a range of wartime topics). Possibly also *Miss Silver Comes to Stay* (written in 1951) for an acknowledgement of generational culture shifts.
*Now the Hell Will Start* by Brendan Koerner.
Nonfiction book about a black US soldier who went AWOL in Burma and joined a native tribe in the jungle, and the US Army manhunt to catch him. Fascinating book about an overlooked theater of war (China-Burma-India or CBI) and the experience of African-American troops in WW2.
Also they’re all post 1980, but the “Night Soldiers” series of spy novels by Alan Furst is excellent precisely because they’re not spy novels about spies, but novels about ordinary people who are forced into the world of espionage by circumstance or by conscience. A lot of them take place right before the war in 1938-39 and involve the NKVD, the Gestapo, and MI6 all seeing the warclouds gathering. They’re also typically set in less common locales, like Poland, Romania, Greece, etc.