Christine Paperback – 2 Aug 2007

Wow... after reading this I struggled for breath. I have never read anything packed with so much red-glowing hatred. There is enough poison in this book to wipe out the world’s entire German population (thank God for that, the author would probably have said). In particularly distasteful I found the comparison of a crowd of Germans to flies as the author lets the letter writer muse that whether it is a fountain or a statue she cannot make out but whatever it is it is ‘encrusted with tem just like one of those sticky fly-sticks is black with flies’. It says a lot about the world we live in that such an abusive piece of writing is deemed as valuable as to be put on ‘gutenberg’ and also to be re-published in the present day Germany and the realm of the English-speaking dominions. Not only that, reviews on both American and German amazon praise this book. It just shows how desensitised and brain-washed we have become.

If you haven't heard of this writer, you should definitely check out some of her stuff. It is difficult to locate good clean copies of her books, except perhaps through interlibrary loan at your local public library. I was so pleased to find this book and receive such a wonderfully clean copy. She has a voice all her own, and each book she's written is a delight in its own way.

After reading ENCHANTED APRIL I wanted to read more works by this author. No libraries in my area have any copies of her books and the only way to read them is to acccess them on the Gutenberg Project. I did not want to use all my ink printing out her works and then I discovered that some of them have recently been reprinted. CHRISTINE is not actually written by von Arnim but rather is a collection of her daughter's letter written to her from Germany prior to the outbreak of World War I and lead up to her daughter's death. Christine was a talentened violinist who was in Germany to study. She is horrified by the militaristic attitude of most Germans and their smugness and superiority. The letters also detail her first love, a German soldier. It is a very touching story as she dies and never sees her mother again.

This brief book is wonderfully written. I would give it five stars if the author did not sometimes stretch credibility with features of this faux-dairy. For instance, the reader quickly wonders what sort of daughter mails her mother several letters a day. Despite these misgivings, I gave way to thinking I was reading real letters from the era preceding the First World War. My first thought upon realizing that the entire diary was fiction was chagrin, and remorse that I had wasted two hours reading a fantasy -- and a fantasy I am unlikely to forget!But I am rethinking my guilt. True, the story provided stereotypes of German society that served as a form of propaganda during the war. Fiction it was, but with a 1917 publication, was it not also prophecy? Isn't it remarkable that the (exaggerated) national characterizations the author elaborated, just one generation later exploded as she described in cultural detail, as the Third Reich! Much of her description matched closely what I read in Eric Metaxas' 2011 book on Bonhoeffer. The scenes were so familiar to me from "Bonhoeffer," and many other books I have read over the years about German society during World War Two, that in reading "Christine" I constantly had to remind myself that I was reading a book published in 1917, not 1940. The uncanny precognition of this fiction speaks to the significance of "the artist as social prophet."

Wow... after reading this I struggled for breath. I have never read anything packed with so much red-glowing hatred. There is enough poison in this book to wipe out the world's entire German population (thank God for that, the author would have probably said). In particularly distasteful I found the comparison of a crowd of Germans to flies as the author lets the letter writer muse that whether it is a fountain or a statue she cannot make out but whatever it is it is `encrusted with them just like one of those sticky fly-sticks is black with flies'. It says a lot about the world we live in that such an abusive piece of writing is deemed as valuable as to be put on `gutenberg' and also to be re-published in present day Germany and the realm of the English-speaking dominions. Not only that, most reviews on both American and German amazon praise this book. It just shows how desensitised and brain-washed we have become.