I purchased the book at Barnes & Noble about a month ago.....and it sat on the table awaiting it's turn until about a week ago. The book is....On Hitler's Mountain....Overcoming the Nazi Legacy of a Nazi Childhood....published in 2005....and the author....Irmgard A. Hunt. I could tell right away that this was an important book in understanding the rise of Nazi Germany....so only a chapter or two into it I wanted to research its author....since the book is her story....and here I came to her obituary.....for she had died at eighty-eight years old....twenty-six days before my attempting this post.
It's an alpine town in the Bavarian Alps.....Berchtesgaden....where Irmgard was born of modest means. Hike up a little further and there was the town of Obersalzberg....and the vacation home of Hitler.....The Berghoff....hike up a little further and there was famous Nazi meeting house....The Eagle's Nest.
The author vividly tells her story....of how most of the citiizen's on Hitler's mountain were swept along with the Nazi tide.....but not all of them. Irmgard desribes her neighbors and family....and her schooling....and sitting on Hitler's knee as a four year old. One by one the men had to leave and go to war....including her father. Then the deaths announcements started to come in....and then the bombs started to fall....but this was not an urban German city....from which is the important perspective that the book gives....for it takes place not only off in the mountains....but the mountain where Hitler spent a lot of time....and where his upper-echelon leadership's families resided.
You can follow this young girl's perspective as it became apparent that Germany was going to lose....and then be almost there with her in her home as reports come in that Hitler committed suicide....and then worry with her as these Americans were closing in on Berchtesgaden....watch the tanks roll up as she did....and then eventually be thankful that it was Americans who rolled up in those tanks. Next came the Marshall Plan....and opportunity....Irmgard emigrates to the United States....and twenty-five years later....with degrees from Columbia and Harvard....MS. Magazine names her one of the...."Eighty women to watch in the 80s."
As always I have to add my own perspective....and what I came to see was a young girl raised in a nominal Lutheran church environment....thinking that this was Christianity....with the results being predictable....which I won't describe here....for the follower of Christ who reads the book will sadly recognize the Christless vacuum....but the liberal reading it will wonder what I see wrong with this. I highly recommend this book. The fact that it was published in 2005....with some interview questions at the end....on America....and if the author thought that its democracy could ever be in danger....I found profound in a way....predictable in a way....right in a way....and wrong in a way.
Irmgard in retrospect was in danger more than once in her life. She survived with flying colors the first....of fortresses and parapets....on Hitler's Mountain....in Nazi Germany 1933-1945....but was not a surviver in the second....of ivory towers and vacant pulpits....vacant the gospel of Jesus Christ...and the power of the Word of God!
