Lambert, Angela. The Lost Life of Eva Braun. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. [library]
Before the actual review, a side note: the footnotes in this book are the most badly edited footnotes I have ever seen in my life. Aside from the fact that the footnotes are frequently repetitious, the numbers in the text are sometimes on the wrong page. Sometimes there seems to be a footnote missing. Sometimes there are two different places pointing to the same footnote. It's just bafflingly awful.
And while I'm bitching about format and production, there was a very poor choice made at some point: there are occasional interpolations from the author's life (e.g., her visit to Berchtesgaden and the almost entirely eradicated ruins of the Berghof), and someone chose to set those off from the main body of the text by indenting them in the same way they indented the block quotes. This meant that, as a reader, I could never be sure when I hit an indented passage, what the species of text was going to be. It was jarring and confusing, and it would have been so easy to fix.
Okay, enough of that.
This is a strange book, since I have to call it both a success and a failure. As a biography of Eva Braun, it is definitely a success. Lambert has done her research; she's dug out the primary sources, she's talked extensively with Eva Braun's only surviving relative. She's asked (most of) the hard questions and done her best to come up with answers. It is a very good biography, and it illuminates a lot of things about, not only Braun, but about Hitler and the society of the top-level Nazis (and their wives) and about German society, specifically the expectations and opportunities of German women in the first part of the twentieth century.
On the other hand, Lambert has a second project, and that I have to call a failure. Lambert's mother was German, a month younger than Eva Braun; Edith "Ditha" Schröder married an Englishman rather than becoming Hitler's mistress, but Lambert's secondary thesis is that by comparing Eva and Ditha, we can understand them both better and empathize with them.
It is true that Lambert's memories of her mother do help to illuminate Eva Braun's largely inaccessible inner life: her resolute, willful ignorance of politics; her unthinking, culturally ingrained racism; the way in which her dependence on a mostly absent and inaccessible man (Lambert's English father seems, from Lambert's account, to have been about as much support to his wife as a pot-hole) made her life miserable and claustrophobic ... even Ditha's brutal sentimentality (when she translated her father's memoir from German to English, she bowdlerized it and inserted encomiums to her mother, and then destroyed the original). In fact, the most broadly useful insight I gained from Lambert's book is her idea that brutality and sentimentality are conjoined twins.
But the question of empathy is harder. I felt sorry for Edith Schröder Helps, but I did not like her. I did not forgive her (which seems to be Lambert's goal). And I found that that question--can we forgive Edith for being the person that she was?--actually hindered the project of understanding, because Lambert's personal need to forgive/defend her mother (and by extension her German female relatives) gets tangled up to the point that she seems to feel that she and her readers also have to forgive Eva Braun.
I can understand Eva Braun without forgiving her. I can believe that she had no idea what Hitler was doing after he came to power, and I certainly don't think she could have changed anything if she had known. I can even admire, in a way, her stubborn loyalty to Hitler. But--and this is something Lambert never discusses--even if she did not know what he was doing, she still chose, willfully, not to know that he was the sort of person who would do those things. (Hitler: not noted for hiding his light under a bushel.) And I can understand that; I can see where that choice emerged from her personality and her upbringing and the society around her. But she made the choice. She chose to pursue Hitler (Eva made all of the running in their relationship until her second suicide attempt convinced him he had to pay a little more attention to what he was doing to her); she chose to sacrifice her entire life to him, with increasing quantities of literalness as she went along. And either she made that choice knowing what he was and deciding to shut her eyes to it, or she deliberately shut her eyes before she made the choice. And she kept them shut every day from 1929 to 1945.
I can understand that. I can recognize that it was a terrible waste of whatever else Eva Braun might have been and I can regret that. I can be infuriated on her behalf that German society, patriarchal and authoritarian, gave her so few options and all of them either bad, or impossible for a woman not as obsessively driven as Leni Riefenstahl, or completely dependent on the character of the man she chose to yoke herself to. I can pity her for the caged and miserable life she led, although a gilded cage is a hell of a lot better than a concentration camp. But I still don't forgive her, and I wish Lambert had used less of her energy in trying to convince me to.
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