'The frequent darkness of our days', Mildred Harnack against the Nazis: a heroine of our time

They said and hid at the same time. So I don't know if I interpreted what those words meant. I read them in the letter that a law student sent to a classmate on All Saints' Day in 1944. They talked about notes and exams, also about an excursion and contacts to locate each other in case they could not meet. They were talking in code and I didn't have the keys. When they met, together with other colleagues from the University, they locked themselves in the cell of a monastery and decided to form a group: a resistance group against Francoism. The protagonist of the biography he was writing assumed the risk of directing a first cell that would multiply in the university. They distributed leaflets and pamphlets, contacted exile networks and promoted some sabotage actions. But what little was preserved of that activity was written in code as a strict security measure. No one was supposed to know.

The adventure he could tell was fascinating, but the lack of documentation made it difficult to jump from myth to historical account. How to make that leap, without ceasing to be factual, much more than half a century later? A year and a half before the writing of that letter she could not interpret, an American who had co-led a resistance group against Nazism was beheaded in Plötzensee, a prison on the outskirts of Berlin. Her name was Mildred Harnack. After World War II, the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps opened a file on her. On January 15, 1947, it was decided to stop the investigation.

Mildred Harnack was born in Milwaukee into a rather broken family. She met her future husband, German economist Arvid Harnack, at the University of Wisconsin. In mid-1929 she moved to Germany. She taught English, had a social conscience, sang protest songs in class. On the last day of November 1932 he changed his language and addressed his students in German to ask them a question: "Should Hitler be chancellor?" We know this because that night a student wrote it down in his diary. The detail of the diary is photographed in the pages of the extraordinary biographical research that is The Frequent Darkness of Our Days, by Rebecca Donner. That diary entry was not written to go down in history, but since that teacher risked her life to save collective freedom, it has ended up becoming a first foundational test of a tragic history of heroism. Page after page, stitching the images we see and the data we read with the political circumstances into exemplary nonfiction, Donner has managed to make the leap from myth, through history, to literature. I will never forget Mildred.

Mildred Harnack had not forgotten her because books had already been dedicated to her, some exhibition, she gave names to streets in Germany. But, as in part happens with the protagonist of Edurne Portela's latest novel, thanks to the literary construction of a resistance against totalitarianism, a concrete life well told manages to transcend and challenges our civic conscience. The novelist Donner has honestly placed her protagonist, a distant relative, at the center of a dark age and, in that place, in which the young woman took a risk in all planes of life, a heartbeat of dignity is heard that resonates from the past to the present as a reference of democratic hope. It is not strange that Donner believed that the time had come to undertake that project when Donald Trump began to have a chance of winning the presidential elections. What this book achieves, based on the documentation that the author inherited through her family (the letters to the mother, which they said without saying) and the one she has sought everywhere, is to be able to say almost everything that should have been hidden and thus discover an exemplary life. Activating democratic memory is one of the best functions of good political storytelling.

Donner activates it in a very persuasive way. At the beginning of each chapter she transcribes the icy answers to the questionnaire about her written in the prison where she died. The document establishes a pact of truth with the reader. What we are told, as evidenced by the banality of bureaucratized evil, is true. And, once we give the narrator confidence, because she reveals all the sources, she uses it to show us the action she describes with emotion and descriptive talent. I'm still on the first few pages. We see an eleven-year-old boy walking the streets of Berlin. He passes by a department store and we smell what he smelled because the narrator has the information to convey it to us. "A perfume and donuts". That capacity for detail is another resource of verisimilitude to reveal the impossible. In the blue backpack, that boy, who in theory went to Mildred's classes, carried secret information from the American espionage networks in the German capital. We don't doubt it. He told the author, she was able to pin it down thanks to the notebooks he kept all his life. As we will not doubt the risk that the members of that circle of resistance assumed by infiltrating the Nazi structure to obtain information. And, finally, of the love letter that Arvid Harnack sent to his wife before he died. Nothing is hidden there anymore. Intimacy and freedom have given meaning to everything.

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