The 'Michel', an unscathed spire that was as important a symbol to the people of Hamburg as St Paul's was to Londoners

232p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 9781903155653
PREFACE BY RUTH EVANS AND AFTERWORD BY CHRISTOPHER BEAUMAN

Persephone Book No. 75, On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germany 1940-46 by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, are letters written (but never posted) by a 60 year-old woman, to her children living abroad, about the experience of living in Hamburg during the war. Discovered in a drawer in the 1970s, they were translated by her daughter, the late Ruth Evans, and first published in England and Germany in 1979. They were serialised on ‘Woman's Hour’ and in the Observer and a television documentary about the book, with Margaret Tyzack acting ‘Tilli’ and many original newsreel shots of a devastated Hamburg, was shown in the autumn of 1979. The Preface, which fills in the background, is by Ruth Evans and the Afterword, which sets the letters in the context of recent controversies about the Allied bombing of German cities, is by Christopher Beauman.

Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg was the daughter of a lawyer who later became Lord Mayor. (Oddly enough, Edith Henrietta Fowler's father was Mayor of Wolverhampton and a cabinet minister.) Tilli was intelligent and well-educated but married very young and had five children. Unusually for the time, she and her husband separated during the First World War and Tilli returned to Hamburg, did some translating and took in lodgers. In 1925 she married a Professor of English who later became Rector of Hamburg University.

By the time the letters begin, therefore, in October 1940, her personal life is slightly complicated, with her children living in far- flung places – her youngest daughter Ruth is living in Wales – and her Hamburg relations of her unconventional personal life. They would have been even more disapproving if they had known that Tilli was keeping what was in effect a diary: the discovery of the letters would certainly have resulted in her and her husband's arrest. In the firstone she writes, about the events leading up to the war, that the German people were led to believe that they had been wantonly attacked but ‘in truth this whole campaign had been planned long ago, the Führer's blind lust for conquest, his megalomania being the driving force.’ She adds, ‘for me nothing was more devastating than the fact that nobody... stood up against this, but remained passive and weak.’

But On the Other Side is not a political book. Instead it is an evocation of daily life in Hamburg during the war years and immediately afterwards (the months after May 1945 make up a third of the book, partly because it was easier to write without the constant threat of bombing and partly because there was no danger in writing). Tilli is very like Vere Hodgson in her observations and her humanity – and her bravery – and we have published her letters partly to provide a parallel with Few Eggs and No Oranges, Persephone Book No.9. In fact Vere’s book also began as letters which she herself turned into diary form in the early 1970s. On neither side of the English Channel were there oranges; but in Germany there was a ‘queue for deep- frozen vegetables. We huddled together outside the small cellar shop and almost automatically fell into conversation. All these women shared the same heartfelt longing for a rapid conclusion to this horrendous war. There was no hope of victory, not the tiniest indication of hero worship for the Nazis. Insane, they called the whole thing, criminally insane.’

‘If you want to know what it was like to be a civilian in wartime Germany you must read this marvellous book’ wrote Timothy Garton Ash in the Spectator in 1979, going on to add: ‘The letters document the terrible suffering caused to the German civil population by Allied bombing. It is difficult to read these pages without feeling that this kind of bombing was worse than a mistake’ (the issues covered in the Afterword). However, this is not a harrowing book, it is gentle and domestic, human and humane – and Tilli did survive. We are proud to add it to our list of nine Second World War books, to which it provides an essential counterpoint and parallel.

A 1926 Bauhaus wall hanging by Anni Albers used for On the Other Side