Building a medieval monastery

A lot of people in today’s society long for a simpler lifestyle, with less technology, fewer consumer goods, and a less hectic pace. But how many would want to try out a 9th century way of living and working?

A German building contractor could give them that opportunity. Bert Geurten plans to build a monastery town the same way it would have been done back in the 9th century. He will use the Plan of St. Gall, which provides a blueprint for a medieval town and monastery.

Books: Plotting Hitler’s Death

I had no idea when I picked this book off the library shelf that I was getting one of the finest books available on the subject. I went there looking for the history behind the movie Valkyrie, and I was surprised to find there were multiple books on the subject. I picked the most recently published based on the fact that its author would have had access to more recently discovered materials (such as diaries or letters that had been kept by the families and only made available to the public decades later).

This review of the book opines that “anything by Joachim Fest is required reading,” especially on the subject of Hitler. Fest knows his subject extremely well, and also knows how to write well. Some history books are a chore to read. This one, on the contrary, was for the most part a pleasure to read. (Brief descriptions of the some of the lesser players in the conspiracy were too short to give me a real feel for their characters, and their roles seemed too small to matter much in the larger story.)

Watching Valkyrie had taught me that there was actually a network of men committed to overthrowing Hitler, not just a few fanatics acting on their own. Plotting Hitler’s Death reveals the surprising extent of that network. It involved hundreds of people (if not thousands – certainly thousands were arrested after the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt), from various sectors of society, and the conspiracy involved not just killing Hitler but setting up a new government in place of the Nazis.

Its extent through time also surprised me. The first coup was planned in 1938, before the war even started. Ironically, it was aborted precisely because Hitler decided not to initiate hostilities yet, because the justification for the coup was supposed to be Hitler’s needlessly plunging Germany into war. The plotters also sent emissaries to contact Germany’s opponents, especially Britain, hoping to push Britain to act decisively against Hitler to forestall war. But British leaders refused to trust Germans who would go against their own government.

Fest does not oversimplify his extremely complex subject. Always before, I have read generalizations about how Hitler rose to power, primarily based on German resentment over the Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the winners of World War I, and Hitler’s using the Jews as a scapegoat for their social and economic problems. Certainly those aspects are true, but Fest explores the multiplicity of factors that gave Hitler such an unshakable grasp on power and his opponents so many missed chances and botched attempts.

Movies: Valkyrie

What a powerful movie!

Both the movie and the recommendation to watch it came from one of my husband’s co-workers. He is a WWII history buff, and assured us that Valkyrie is quite faithful to history. I found out from imdb.com that there are some factual inaccuracies, particularly in the kind of airplanes that were used (in some cases because there simply are no examples left of the planes actually used), but that hardly detracts from one’s appreciation of the movie – unless perhaps you are an expert in military aviation.

I knew that there had been attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been involved such plotting, and was hanged for it shortly before the fall of Berlin. But I had never realized just how many people, especially senior military officers, had been working to overthrow Hitler, or how many attempts had been made to kill him. A note at the end of Valkyrie says that the July 20 attempt was the last of fifteen attempts, but according to the “Goofs” section at imdb.com, there were actually 42 known assassination attempts.

I think this movie would have been a riveting story even if it were fiction, but knowing that it is based on history makes it all the more impressive. We know the outcome, of course – Hitler committed suicide at the end of the war, so the assassination attempt must have failed. But the movie nevertheless maintains a surprising level of suspense. Will the plotters at least escape with their lives? Will Colonel Stauffenberg go home to his pregnant wife and his children?

As happened with the book about mountain-climber George Mallory, this movie left me wanting to know more about Claus von Stauffenberg and the German Resistance movement. Fortunately there have been many books written on the subject (our local library has two just on Stauffenberg), so I will be reading up on this subject in the coming weeks.