- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Corgi; New edition edition (1 July 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0552994693
- ISBN-13: 978-0552994699
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.6 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 382,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
The sequel to The Past is Myself
Product Description
Following the extraordinary success of her wartime memoirs, The Past Is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg received thousands of letters from readers begging her to describe what happened next. The Road Ahead takes up the story at the moment the first volume left off - with the outbreak of peace.
Germany was devastated by war and its aftermath, while Britain seemed grey and exhausted to Christabel. She was soon appointed the Observer's special correspondent in Germany, and, reunited with her husband, Peter (technically an enemy alien), she joined the struggle for reconciliation with, and the rebuilding of, a defeated nation. It was Peter's near-fatal accident and her own illness which decided the young couple to turn their backs on England and Germany and make a new start farming in Ireland.
Life was harsh at first, but predictably Christabel found humour in the accidents of poverty and the many mishaps of country life. The beautiful scenery of the Wicklow Mountains provided a haven for the family and for the hosts of young people from all over the world who joined them each summer. Christabel became involved with the Peace Women of Northern Ireland and learned as much as she could about the adopted country she had grown to love so passionately. Taking her seventieth birthday as a stopping point for a life that even now, some fourteen further years on, is as rich and full as it ever was, she looks back with characteristic modesty and gratitude. Her readers will be enchanted by this second volume of memoirs, as clear-sighted and generous, as honest, funny, touching and brave as The Past Is Myself.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The authoress was a niece of Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper magnate (and, so her Wikipedia entry says, of two other newspaper owners, Harmsworth and Rothermere). She married a German lawyer in 1934. during the Second World War she stayed in Berlin, Hamburg and in the Black Forest. In Berlin, she was a noted loudmouth locally about what she saw as the evils of the National Socialist government and way of life. Her husband was interned for 7 months in a concentration camp though later released to serve in a penal unit of the Wehrmacht (until he escaped, she says, though Wikipedia has it that this lady spoke to the Gestapo and they allowed her husband leave before joining his penal unit; he then slipped away...a turn of events which could only be fantasy had it happened under the Soviet regime and not the supposedly evil "Nazi" one....) . These facts are contained within the lady's earlier work, The Past Is Myself.
This book picks up the story at the end of the Second World War in the Black Forest. She notes the rapes and robberies carried out by the "French" troops which came into Germany on the backs of the Anglo-American forces. In fact the troops were mostly (probably quite deliberately) blacks from West and NorthWest Africa and their officers either the same or riff-raff of one sort or another. some of the white "soldiers" were elements of the riff-raff known as the "Maquis".
The authoress is allowed to take her family to her native UK and stays, unhappily with relatives, though she notes, naively, how little of the black market exists in the UK! So she says. She later, around 1946 or 1947, visits Berlin and sees the "rubble women" trying to clear the devastated city. Many had been raped etc by Soviet soldiery and were now clearing rubble with their bare hands (there is a high hill in Berlin called the Teufelsberg or Devil's Mountain, made out of a lot of that rubble). Even her British soldier driver notes the incredible devastation of the German cities as compared to his native Coventry, often today put as a parallel...
After a year or so, she takes her family including her husband to Eire, though she had been "disappointed" I think she says, by de Valera's note of condolence on the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945. They buy a farm (no doubt she tapped some family money somewhere or other) and live as farmers in the Republic.
Mrs Bielenberg notes the change in Eire from the 1940's through to the 1980's, this book being printed in 1992. I saw big changes from my first visit in 1978 to the next one in 1986. I wonder what she made of the emergence of the charmless, hard-nosed and somehow un-Irish businessmen who now run British Airways and Ryanair?
The authoress later gets involved with the Peace Movement in Eire and Northern Ireland and especially with one of its leading lights, Mairead Corrigan, who (later, after the publication of this book) won the Nobel Peace Prize and even later, indeed very recently, was --I think, but am not sure-- one of those detained by Israeli forces for trying to enter the Gaza ghetto on a ship carrying humanitarian aid supplies).
The book has parts of interest but the second part at least did not grip me, though some might well enjoy it.
This book picks up the story at the end of the Second World War in the Black Forest. She notes the rapes and robberies carried out by the "French" troops which came into Germany on the backs of the Anglo-American forces. In fact the troops were mostly (probably quite deliberately) blacks from West and NorthWest Africa and their officers either the same or riff-raff of one sort or another. some of the white "soldiers" were elements of the riff-raff known as the "Maquis".
The authoress is allowed to take her family to her native UK and stays, unhappily with relatives, though she notes, naively, how little of the black market exists in the UK! So she says. She later, around 1946 or 1947, visits Berlin and sees the "rubble women" trying to clear the devastated city. Many had been raped etc by Soviet soldiery and were now clearing rubble with their bare hands (there is a high hill in Berlin called the Teufelsberg or Devil's Mountain, made out of a lot of that rubble). Even her British soldier driver notes the incredible devastation of the German cities as compared to his native Coventry, often today put as a parallel...
After a year or so, she takes her family including her husband to Eire, though she had been "disappointed" I think she says, by de Valera's note of condolence on the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945. They buy a farm (no doubt she tapped some family money somewhere or other) and live as farmers in the Republic.
Mrs Bielenberg notes the change in Eire from the 1940's through to the 1980's, this book being printed in 1992. I saw big changes from my first visit in 1978 to the next one in 1986. I wonder what she made of the emergence of the charmless, hard-nosed and somehow un-Irish businessmen who now run British Airways and Ryanair?
The authoress later gets involved with the Peace Movement in Eire and Northern Ireland and especially with one of its leading lights, Mairead Corrigan, who (later, after the publication of this book) won the Nobel Peace Prize and even later, indeed very recently, was --I think, but am not sure-- one of those detained by Israeli forces for trying to enter the Gaza ghetto on a ship carrying humanitarian aid supplies).
The book has parts of interest but the second part at least did not grip me, though some might well enjoy it.
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