Inge's War

Starred review from February 10, 2020
Journalist O’Donnell’s vivid and meticulously researched debut unearths the hidden history of her maternal grandmother’s flight from East Prussia during WWII and offers key insights into the lives of ordinary Germans under Nazi rule. Before 2006, O’Donnell writes, she knew her grandmother, Inge, as an “aloof, somewhat selfish woman, quick in her criticisms.” But O’Donnell’s visit to Kaliningrad, Russia (formerly Königsberg, Germany), the city where Inge lived until she, her parents, and her infant daughter (O’Donnell’s mother) fled the Soviet Army’s advance in 1945, cracked Inge’s reserve and led to a series of revelations about her family’s “apathy” during Hitler’s rise to power, her early adult years in wartime Berlin; her hardships as a refugee in Denmark and northern Germany; and the secret that doomed her relationship with O’Donnell’s biological grandfather, a soldier captured by the Soviets on the Eastern Front. O’Donnell fills in the gaps in Inge’s memories with investigative reporting, historical research, and imaginative recreations of key moments, delivering an incisive and multilayered account of family trauma, the dangers of nationalism and anti-Semitism, and the plight of refugees. This exceptional account transforms a private tragedy into a universal story of war and survival. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

February 15, 2020
O'Donnell, a former political correspondent at Bloomberg, debuts with a wrenching family story that spreads across much of the landscape of World War II. The principal figure in the story is Inge, the author's grandmother, who died in 2017; throughout the author's youth, Inge was reticent, even secretive, about her experiences during the war. "Silence has always dominated women's experience of war," writes the author. Inge's experiences, she writes, comprise "a story of love and family, of a girl from a vanished land who lived through a time when Europe, and its humanity, collapsed." Inge and her family lived comfortably in the Prussian town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) near the Baltic Sea. The author follows the family--and some of their acquaintances and intimates--through the war and after, chronicling the many horrors they experienced, including displacement, poverty, violence, and, finally, their eventual restoration. O'Donnell's narrative technique is engaging. She intercuts her family's experiences with her own as she relentlessly pursued their stories. She traveled to all the key sites, interviewed relatives and scholars, and dug through libraries and archives, including her own family's. "There's something about physically seeing places that drives home the reality of the past," she writes. O'Donnell's many discoveries included letters, photographs (many of which she includes with the text), and records of all sorts. Gradually, Inge opened up about her past, and we learn that it has some dark corners. Her youthful lover impregnated her, but his father would not permit a marriage, so he left her and went off to war. O'Donnell also discovered a number of key elements of Inge's history after her death. The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war. Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 21, 2020

This work by award-winning journalist O'Donnell provides details of World War II and the lives of a German family who were neither persecuted nor active members of the Nazi Party. O'Donnell asks (and answers) questions such as: What was life like for her grandmother as a single mother? Why did she not reunite with her love after the war? What about the Germany in the years following? At turns touching and surprising, O'Donnell's work offers an honest look at how strength, weakness, and resiliency can shape who you are and who you become. Consulting both primary and secondary resources to support her narrative, O'Donnell conveys an understanding of the day-to-day challenges facing young women in the late stages of the Third Reich. VERDICT A welcome addition to World War II memoirs.--Maria Bagshaw, Elgin Community Coll. Lib., IL

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2020
O'Donnell tells the true story of her German grandmother Inge, a cold woman who used stony aloofness as a shield against her memories. It was only when the author was nursing her own broken heart that her grandmother first began opening up to her, and this book reveals their developing closeness as painful events are tugged from the past. Readers learn how Inge, an indulged teenager, left her family home in East Prussia to attend school in Berlin in 1940. Inge was soon swept up into city life, becoming a "Swing Kid," a Nazi-defying jazz enthusiast, before finding herself pregnant by a young soldier shipping out to the Eastern Front. This is just the beginning of years of hardship: privation, flight from the advancing Red Army, perilous sea escapes, wretched Danish refugee camps, sexual exploitation, rape, and another unwanted pregnancy. O'Donnell pieces the story together from her grandmother's repressed memories, old family photographs, and meticulous research. This compelling testimonial details the deprivations German citizens faced during the war and reveals a dark part of Danish history. The perspective is enlightening and the accounts of sexual abuse are timely to the continuing Me Too discourse. This memoir deserves a wide audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 15, 2020
O'Donnell, a former political correspondent at Bloomberg, debuts with a wrenching family story that spreads across much of the landscape of World War II. The principal figure in the story is Inge, the author's grandmother, who died in 2017; throughout the author's youth, Inge was reticent, even secretive, about her experiences during the war. "Silence has always dominated women's experience of war," writes the author. Inge's experiences, she writes, comprise "a story of love and family, of a girl from a vanished land who lived through a time when Europe, and its humanity, collapsed." Inge and her family lived comfortably in the Prussian town of K�nigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) near the Baltic Sea. The author follows the family--and some of their acquaintances and intimates--through the war and after, chronicling the many horrors they experienced, including displacement, poverty, violence, and, finally, their eventual restoration. O'Donnell's narrative technique is engaging. She intercuts her family's experiences with her own as she relentlessly pursued their stories. She traveled to all the key sites, interviewed relatives and scholars, and dug through libraries and archives, including her own family's. "There's something about physically seeing places that drives home the reality of the past," she writes. O'Donnell's many discoveries included letters, photographs (many of which she includes with the text), and records of all sorts. Gradually, Inge opened up about her past, and we learn that it has some dark corners. Her youthful lover impregnated her, but his father would not permit a marriage, so he left her and went off to war. O'Donnell also discovered a number of key elements of Inge's history after her death. The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war. Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.