The Lost Life of Eva Braun

Angela Lambert
Call no. 943.086 LAM

I don't really know why I borrowed this book . Maybe the cover said something to me. It had a photo of Hitler (standing) and Eva seated and she had a nice, clean, clear of evil look about her. So I thought this might be an interesting take on the Eva Braun. The mistress. The one who accompanied Hitler in death.

I don't mind reading the book, but I really objected to the author weaving in her own family into Eva's story. It's kind of like a biographic bandwagon... it's like saying, Eva lived during this time (and oh, by the way, so did my grandma, who also happened to be German and who lived nearly in the same city, etc.) I don't care two hoots about the author's grandma, especially when it came in small mozaic moments. I particularly took objection to the author inserted photos of her grandparents in among the photo pages of Hitler and Eva.

This diluted the authorship and credibility of the book. For eg: when Geli committed suicide (the author did mention that there were rumours about Himmler murdering Geli, but she brushed that aside with nothing else than her subjective hands, as she has done with countless other counter facts) she wrote: "The event triggered a huge scandal and a feeding frenzy in the newspaper.... The news would certainly have reached my mother in Hamburg. Ditha (author's mother) was twenty by then and given her love of gossip and interest in the paccadilloes of great men, she must have speculated about the truth behind the denials. Was it possible the Fuhrer had murdered his own niece? " Frankly, I didn't care what Ditha thought. Especially if Ditha's life was only going to be mentioned as a sub-plot or used as a punction mark to link speculation and fact.

This made me wonder more about Eva Braun, but it convinced me that I was not going to find out about Eva Braun via Ditha or by continuing to read Angela Lambert's book.