Norman Ohler follows up his fantastic book Blitzed (my favourite book of 2016) with The Bohemians, another history book about the Third Reich, focusing mainly on two figures, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, a young couple who were part of the German resistance to Hitler’s Nazi regime during the war. I’d like to say this was every bit as eye-opening and gripping as Blitzed but unfortunately it’s nowhere near as good.
I expected another great story of a subject I don’t really know much about - the Germans who stood up to the Nazis - having only read Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in Berlin and seen the Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie. Well - this is one story that won’t be made into a Hollywood movie anytime soon!
About the most exciting thing Harro and Libertas do is transmit military information to the Soviets (Harro was a Luftwaffe officer so had access to some classified material), which they barely managed to do once and which was ignored by the Russians anyway. Most of the time the transmitter didn’t work and eventually, through incompetence, the Russians would rumble the resistance. It couldn’t have been much more fruitless an exercise!
Their other activities included printing up subversive pamphlets and stickers, sending out the pamphlets in the mail and putting up the stickers at an exhibit. Libertas worked in the film industry and had some influence over what projects got green-lit, choosing content that went right up against the rules of what was allowed under Nazi propaganda.
I kept waiting for some revelatory new detail to emerge or for the story to show why it needed to be told but it was never very interesting. It’s not a good sign when you look back on a book and realise it didn’t tell you much more than the blurb on the back did initially! And it’s an overfamiliar story if you’re aware of the history of this period: these were another group of brave souls who did what they could to resist history’s definitive thugs and unfortunately paid the ultimate price.
Ohler’s writing style is similar to Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood so that the history book often reads like a novel. It’s a bit too neat for a nonfiction history book and felt like Ohler was taking too many liberties at times, but I guess it does make for an easier read for more general readers. The title is also something of a misnomer - Libs is allowed to sleep with as many men as she wants but when Harro decides to have an affair with another woman and she finds out, she starts screaming about divorce. Not very “bohemian”!
I just want to make it clear though that I really do admire people like Harro, Libertas and everyone else in their group. Standing up to the Nazis like they did was beyond brave and to stick to their principles in the darkest of times, right in the heart of and at the height of evil, deserves to be honoured. Not many people could do that - I certainly couldn’t. And what’s worse is that the Gestapo pricks who tortured these people got to escape punishment themselves and live out the rest of their natural lives after the war. If there was real justice in the world, it should have been the other way around with the Nazis swinging from a noose instead.
That said, as incredible as their sacrifices were, it doesn’t make for a gripping or enlightening read - and I have to say that because I picked this up expecting to be riveted like I was with Blitzed and I so wasn’t with The Bohemians. Harro and Libs’ activities were uninteresting and minimally effective at best, which is probably why they’re largely unknown, and their story was similar to many others’ during the war - good people standing up to bad and sadly losing. The final part with the Nazis eventually catching up to the resistance was kinda interesting but it wasn’t worth slogging through the whole book for.
As noble as Harro, Libs and their associates’ aims were, an entire book on them is a rather tedious reading experience and, if you want to know the details of these people, a quick scan of Wikipedia is probably sufficient instead. If you’re as much of a fan of Blitzed as me, don’t expect a similar experience with The Bohemians.
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