Customer Reviews

The Lost Life of Eva Braun

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book looked great on the shelf, the cover prompted me to buy the book, however, as previously remarked by other reviewers, large footnotes on the pages, often taking up more than the text itself were a struggle. I found it very hard to keep reading this book, despite my interest in the topic. Why could the footnotes not have been referred to in an appendix at the back? Also the writing and research was as speculative as Nerin Guns....just as chatty and just an uninformative! I didnt understand why the author also had to put her own italics on other peoples quotes. This did nothing to accentuate the point, infact other readers I have spoken to about this book thought that she was just tagging her own point of view onto the quote.

I appreciated Ms Lanbert was trying to parallel her mothers life with Eva's, but at times its was a tedious and unnecessary addition, and I found myself skipping forward to the the text about Eva Braun, because again it was speculative, and boring.

I was hoping that this book would give me an even better idea of the life of Eva Braun, but I came away knowing not much more than I did before I started the book. What I did get from this book was a pain in my head, from the sheer annoyance of those footnotes! I certainly wont be prompted to read any of this authors books again.

Much like other reviewers of this book, I was sorely disappointed by this hash of a biography.

Firstly, I use the term 'biography' very loosely as the narrative appears to wander at will almost from the start. Primarily, Angela Lambert's book suffers from being unsure whether to focus upon depicting Eva Braun's existence or that of various close relatives of the author. The reader is 'treated' to excerpts and events from Angela Lambert's mother's life on many occasions, all without any discernable reason that is significant for the understanding of Eva's life!. And all with a passion that is infuriating, considering the lack of information that Angela Lambert herself admits, is available to writers studying the life of Eva.

Secondly, Lambert like many before her, is inevitably side-tracked from her aim of giving the reader a clearer understanding of this much misunderstood woman, by focusing at length on the background, upbringing and emotional condition of Adolf Hitler. Obviously, Eva Braun's life cannot be written without reference to Hitler, but attempting to portray the dictator's inner psychological and emotional state at any given occasion is surely not only redundant, given the wealth of better informed material available, but inconclusive when determining Eva's impact upon his life (negligible at most!).

Angela Lambert herself writes at the beginning of her book that very little information, bar 22 pages of Miss Braun's diary, is available to historians on the subject of Eva's life, which worried me a little, considering I was about to begin a 600 page life of the woman!

In the end, I believe Angela Lambert has contributed very little to the debate around Eva's relationship with Hitler and her beliefs with regard to Nazism and conflict-ridden Germany, although she does come dangerously close to portraying Hitler as one deserving of sympathy in certain quarters. This is German history for Mills and Boon fans, not those seeking enlightenment on the subject at hand!

The review by Moon Cheese says it all. There are minimal FACTS available about the life of Eva Braun. Authors therefore have to 'pad out' the content with much other material. What facts there are can easily be found online, there are very many photos online too. No need to buy a book such as this.

This is a poor biography, largely due to the subject (Eva Braun is such a non-entity and there is a paucity of real detail) and Lamberts inability to stick to the script. Is this a history or a biography? So many references to real events are lifted from others (Kershaw and Burleigh are much better writers and more respected historians, using Wikipedia is just lazy research). All Lambert is left with is conjecture, poorly realised imagination and feminist drivel.

The Lost Life of Eva Braun contains much more information about the life of Hitler's mistress than has before been available in English. In most of the major biographies of Hitler (Bullock, Fest, Kershaw, et al) Eva Braun is barely acknowledged; one gets then impression that she is felt not to be worthy of comment. Angela Lambert's book provides the reader with details of this missing aspect of Hitler's life; adding to our knowledge of Hitler as a person (if we regard Hitler as a monster alone then it is as if we say 'well, he wasn't one of us'). Until reading this book, I hadn't really appreciated the significance to Hitler of Eva's decision to remain with him Berlin - it was these last few days that enabled Eva to prove the stength of her feelings, in a situation of the greatest adversity. This is a poignant story (despite the very obvious excesses of the Nazi regieme, one can still regard Eva's fate as being sad)of the short life of a vivacious and intelligent young woman. Angela Lambert's research appears to have been very thorough and there are particularly interesting notes regarding the fate of Eva's diaries, letters and personal possessions. Some reviewers I note have remarked on the discursive nature of the text. I found the information about Mrs Lambert's family, persons who had lived in Hitler's Germany, to be illuminating and to put many of the facts concerning Eva's life into a wider cultural context. In summary: recommended.

I wrote an essay on Eva Braun and this book was key to a lot of my research. It doesn't have the finer details I needed but it did pointed me in the right direction for further research. I'd recommend it as a starting point.

Some interesting snippets about the life of a girl who had a lively personality but was not given to much serious thought. Rather a waste of a life in reality. The book tells us more about Hitler than Eva and I've no doubt that in his way he did come to love her. I found it rather sad because despite her love of Hitler I came to like Eva in spite of myself. The book is well written and if you are interested in what makes people like Eva tick then it's well worth reading.

Angela Lambert has written a very detailed, very deeply researched biography of Eva Braun, which takes us through every aspect and every major event in her life, and, necessarily, in the life of Adolf Hitler. In many ways we are overwhelmed with detail. For instance - Hitler never gave her any very valuable presents and often had other's buy them for her, although he did give her a black Mercedes car, and a chauffeur - but this was late in their relationship; for much of their twelve years of liaison, Eva was kept firmly in the background. On state occasions, for instance, the sophisticated and sharp-witted Magda Goebels presided at his side. Few people knew that Eva was his lover and in fact, it was assumed she was just another secretary until fairly late in their relationship. In effect, however, Eva Braun learned to play quite a clever hand. Outwardly she was a paragon of submissiveness and devotion, but behind the scenes she was learning to use her hold over him. What began as a teenaged crush on a rising star in the Nazi Party, later turned into quite a manipulative passive/aggressive stance. As Lambert says, "Their psychological interaction was a subtle interplay of emotional - not sexual - control, that would have astonished the stony, disapproving Nazi wives had they been acute enough to notice."

Astonishingly, Eva Braun comes over as a nice, middle-class, even-tempered (though with hidden depths), young woman. She tried to commit suicide twice during their relationship, hopelessly in love with him and fearing he was losing interest in her. But in fact she was exactly what he needed. Naïve, vain, uncultured and lacking in self-confidence she might have been, she can also be described in terms of what she wasn't. She wasn't clever or intellectual, she wasn't demanding, she accepted that he would never marry - not her, and not anyone else, either. Eva was also in love with him. What he felt for her must have been tainted by his own ego-mania, but in the end she chose to die with him in a bunker while the battle for Berlin raged around them.

Lambert tackles the subject of what Eva Braun and other women of the Reich could have known about the unremitting slaughter that was happening to the millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Bolsheviks, Jehovah's Witnesses, mentally subnormal people, and other groups that were targeted by Nazi policies. They must have known something, as one bold and outspoken opponent of the Nazi's, Count Helmet von Moltke, said "Again and again one hears reports that in transports of prisoners or Jews only 20 per cent arrive, that there is starvation in the POW camps, that typhoid and all the other deficiency epidemics have broken out and that our own people are breaking down from exhaustion... How can anyone know these things and still walk around free?" It must have been a fact that many ordinary Germans felt this kind of complicity with obscene conditions, yet many more were also in thrall to the sense of destiny that Hitler's charisma had instilled. Earlier this year, I read the novel The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, and I felt it give a very keen idea of how flatly and implacably the sense that there was only one truth, only one way forward, and that was Hitler's way. He held the whole nation to ransome in the name of his sense of destiny.

The photographs in this book put a great deal of flesh on the bones of the story of Eva Braun and her twelve-year affair with the monster that was Hitler. Lambert says, "Only now, sixty years later, are the Germans beginning to realise that they too were victims. A luftwaffe pilot said after the war, `Wars might be caused by weak or morally cretinous people but they are fought and endured by very decent ones.'"

Eva Braun...a woman who maybe gets a mere paragraph in everyone of the Hitler books I've read has finally got a book all to herself. With the exception of Hitler's Women, Guiddo Knopps book about the females close to the Fuhrer,this is the best biography of the tyrants mistress. I agree it is a bit too long but this gives a much better insight into Hitler's private life and his relationships.

I purchased the hardback copy of this book and did find it heavy going at times but found it hard to put down.

It is important to remember that the bulk of these events happened between 70-80 years ago and therefore the amount of eye-witnesses would have to be very few. Angela Lambert draws analogies from her own life in how it dovetails with Eva Braun's and compares their lives.

It is hard to understand how a vivacious pretty German girl fell in love with a man synonymous with evil - but fall in love with him she did. Lambert touches on the suicide of Geli Rauble, Hitler's niece and outlines the family trees of both Hitler and Eva and it should be known that Hitler's surviving family members now no longer use the name of Hitler to distance themselves from the past.

To me, Eva came across as a feather-headed young woman at times, interested in films, gossip and make-up but hardly any different from some young women of today. However, it appeared that this is what attracted her to Hitler - the very fact that she didn't spout politics and opinions. She was an escape from all that for him - but the only thing Eva seemed to crave from Hitler was the one thing he really couldn't give her - his time. Surrounded by sycophants, she was never taken seriously - as both Bormann's and Goebbels wives had all proved their worth in supplying German with nearly 20 children between them, Eva would have looked rather worthless in their eyes and this was how she was treated.

It is still hard to work out why Eva felt the need to go to her death with Hitler but perhaps something in her mind told her that she should truly prove her love for him by following him to the grave.

Despite all that has been said about Eva being an evil person, who hated children and all that, she comes across as a surprisingly likeable young woman who simply fell in love with the wrong man. Many women down the years and ages have done the same, the only thing is that the wrong man in this instance was Adolf Hitler.

The book is heavy going sometimes with the constant checking of footnotes but Lambert has certainly given this her best shot with what little resources were available to her and that only one of Eva's relatives was still alive at the time.

Despite what other reviewers have said, I took up this book with every intention of becoming more informed of Eva and as I said, I actually came away from it having discovered a young woman that was ordinary but extremely likeable.