This offers a rare perspective for the English-language reader, to see World War II from the POV of a German civilian, in this case a teenage girl from a middle-class family in Hamburg. Hilke was twelve when she began her diary in 1940, and seventeen when it ended in 1945. I've never read the diary of a non-Jewish German civilian written during that time period. Indeed, this may be the only one that's available in English.

Unfortunately, the book is very boring. Most diaries are. I own several (unpublished) historical diaries and they're all quite mundane. Hilke seems to have been largely apolitical, although when the Allies invaded and everyone was tearing down their Hitler posters and swastika flags she did write in her diary how disgusted she was by their unpatriotic behavior, and how she actually left the room when she saw someone using a swastika flag as a dishcloth. But if I were a patriotic German having grown up under Nazism, I might well feel the same way.

Biographical information about the other family members, and photos of them, help pad out the story, but some annotations from would have been nice. It would have been nice to have some recollections from Hilke about her wartime experiences that she didn't write about in her diary at the time.

I understand that this is not the book's fault. Hilke herself was killed in a car accident in 1950s, aged only 27, and the book was translated and edited by her sister Geseke. But it seems like Geseke could have provided the aforementioned annotations, or gotten some scholar of the German war effort to write an illuminating foreword about life as a German civilian in World War II. (A matter of interest: as in the major British cities, early in the war the families living in major German cities often had their children evacuated to the countryside to escape the expected bombardment.)

I would say this book is for a select audience and the general population wouldn't find it of much use. I'm going to donate my copy to the local library. ( )