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Life with Hitler
by Heike B. Gortemaker
In this groundbreaking biography of Eva Braun, German historian Heike B. Görtemaker delves into the startlingly neglected historical truth about Adolf Hitler's mistress. More than just the vapid blonde of popular cliché, Eva Braun was a capricious but uncompromising, fiercely loyal companion to Hitler; theirs was a relationship that flew in the face of the Führer's proclamations that Germany was his only bride. Görtemaker paints a portrait of Hitler and Braun's life together with unnerving quotidian detail - Braun chose the movies screened at their mountaintop retreat (propaganda, of course); he dreamed of retiring with her to Linz one day after relinquishing his leadership to a younger man - while weaving their personal relationship throughout the fabric of one of history's most devastating regimes.
Though Braun gradually gained an unrivaled power within Hitler's inner circle, her identity was kept a secret during the Third Reich, until the final days of the war. Faithful to the end, Braun committed suicide with Hitler in 1945, two days after their marriage.
Through exhaustive research, newly discovered documentation, and anecdotal accounts, Görtemaker has meticulously built a surprising portrait of Hitler's bourgeois existence outside of the public eye. Though Eva Braun had no role in Hitler's policies, she was never as banal as she was previously painted; she was privy to his thoughts, ruled life within his entourage, and held his trust. As horrifying as it is astonishing, Eva Braun will undoubtedly be referenced in all future accounts of this period.
"Having painstakingly reviewed the archives for references to Braun's relationship with Hitler, Görtemaker presents a portrait of an engaged and engaging young woman." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. As thorough and clear a look of a monster's lover as we are likely to get." - Kirkus Reviews
"Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to whip up any sympathy for or to empathize with one of history's most notorious mistresses, Görtemaker does provide a more nuanced view of this marginalized woman by examining the pivotal role she played in Hitler's life and within his inner circle…" - Booklist
"Göertemaker turns on its head the preconceptions about Hitler and Eva - that he was asexual, while she was dim - and uses only material and anecdotes supported by documentation or eye-witness accounts." - Daily Mail (UK)
"[H]istorian Heike Görtemaker sifts thoroughly and cautiously through the available documentation to try and find an answer to... perplexing human questions." - The National Interest
This information about Eva Braun was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Heike B. Görtemaker, born in 1964, is a German historian and author. She studied history, economics, and German literature in Berlin and Bloomington, Indiana. In 2005, she published a biography of Margret Boveri, a prominent German journalist from the 1930s to the 1970s. Görtemaker lives with her husband near Berlin. She is currently working on a project dealing with the legacy of Hitler's inner circle in postwar Germany.
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