Christabel Bielenberg, 94; Wrote of Struggle to Survive the Nazis
Christabel Bielenberg, 94, the author of an internationally acclaimed memoir of her struggle to survive Nazi Germany, died Sunday at her family estate in rural Ireland.
Bielenberg’s “The Past Is Myself,” published in 1968, became a bestseller in the mid-1980s after it was turned into the British TV drama “Christabel” starring Elizabeth Hurley. Her memoir told how her marriage to a German law student put her on a collision course with history.
Born Christabel Burton in London in 1909, she rejected an Oxford University scholarship to study opera in Hamburg, where she met Peter Bielenberg. They married in 1934 -- and she renounced her British citizenship -- after Adolf Hitler rose to power.
In 1944, her husband, a civil servant in the Ministry of Economics, supported an unsuccessful plot by generals and government officials to assassinate Hitler. Thanks in part to her diplomatic appeals, he escaped execution and was sent to fight on the Russian front.
After the war, she worked as a correspondent for the British newspaper the Observer; he was a finance official in the first West German government.
She wrote a sequel to her memoir, titled “The Road Ahead” and published in 1992, that described her family’s transition from Germany to Ireland.
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