Rebecca Donner - All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

This is a work of nonfiction.

Any words that appear between quotation marks are from a letter, a postcard, a memoir, a diary, a handwritten note, a declassified intelligence report, or other document that I discovered in an archive.

In books, newspaper articles, and archival documents, Mildred appears variously as Mildred Harnack, Mildred Fish-Harnack, and Mildred Harnack-Fish. The confusion stems from Mildred herself. In the United States, she called herself Mildred Fish-Harnack; in Germany, she called herself Mildred Harnack-Fish. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to her in these pages as Mildred Harnack.

Mildred was known to many as a woman who chose her words carefully. Her utterances were sparse, a German woman remembered, often with a surprising clarity. She listened quietly, an American woman recalled. When she did speak, she commanded attention. If you flip to the end of the book youll see the sources for these quotations. Throughout this book I use endnotes, not footnotes, to cite my sources.

This book follows two narratives: one chronicles Mildred, and one chronicles a boy named Don. In Dons chapters, I use italics instead of quotation marks to indicate the thoughts and conversations he remembered having during that time. During the Second World War, at the age of eleven, Don became Mildreds courier.

The title of this book comes from a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that Mildred translated in her prison cell. There is some debate about whether an s can be discerned at the end of the word trouble in Mildreds original handwritten translation. We must bear in mind that translation is an art, not a science; Mildreds translations were often looser, and less literal, than the academic renditions of Goethe poems that we may encounter. We must also bear in mind that Mildred wrote with a pencil stub in a damp prison cell.

Harald Poelchau remembered seeing Mildred bent over the book of Goethe poems, the pencil stub in her hand, when he visited her prison cell. Poelchau worked as a chaplain of the prison and was a member of an underground resistance group founded in the rural town of Kreisau in Silesia. It is because of Poelchau that we have Mildreds translations of Goethe. On February 16, 1943, he slipped the book into the folds of his robe and smuggled it out.

Questionnaire

Pltzensee Prison, Berlin

February 16, 1943

Last name	Harnack
First name	Mildred
Date of birth	9/16/02
Place of birth	Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Do you have assets? How much and what do they include?	8.47 (?) in my pocket 1 ship ticket United States Lines $127 (paid in Reichsmark) in my purse some money in Deutsche Bank Apartment furnishings, especially in the two front rooms, Woyrschstr. 16, Berlin, with two Oriental carpets; a light and a dark one with uneven stars and colors
Why are you punished now? Do you admit committing the crime you are charged with? In which circumstances and for what reason did you commit the crime?	Accomplice in treason