BLOOD & BANQUETS: A Berlin Diary 1930-1938...

BLOOD & BANQUETS: A Berlin Diary 1930-1938 by Bella Fromm (Touchstone: $12.). The daughter of a prominent Jewish family, Bella Fromm was forced to begin working when her fortune disappeared in the runaway inflation that wracked Germany after World War I. As “Frau Bella,” the society columnist for the highbrow Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung, she frequented the most exclusive circles, describing the activities of Chancellor Von Hindenburg and the Hohenzollern princes for her readers. At the same time she kept a secret journal that recorded the revulsion she felt watching Hitler’s rise to power, realizing he would destroy her beloved country. Fromm also had to socialize with the new Nazi elite, including industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda--whom Fromm had known as Mrs. Gunther Quandt, the stepdaughter of a Jewish waiter. In one chilling entry, she describes meeting Hitler in March, 1933, and having her hand kissed by the demagogue she despised: “In talking to people you got the impression that he was addressing an audience. The most casual remark was delivered as though to a mass meeting. His gestures appeared as studied, and as unnatural, as those of a ham actor. He was no awe-inspiring personality. He gave no impression of dignity . . . he was self-conscious and inferior in attitude. He did not know what to do with his hands.” Fromm remained in Berlin despite dire warnings from friends because her extensive social connections allowed her to aid victims of political persecution; she fled at the last possible moment (September, 1938) to America, where she was pursued by Nazi agents. Her fascinating and often frightening memoir evokes the doomed world of prewar Berlin as vividly as Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated stories.