Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:
The title of Rebecca Donner’s astonishing new book is a line by Goethe, from a volume of his poems that had been smuggled into the cell of Mildred Harnack — an American woman who was shackled in a Berlin prison, awaiting her death sentence by the Nazi regime. On Feb. 16, 1943, the day she would be taken to the execution shed and beheaded, a chaplain found Mildred hunched over the poems, scribbling in the margins. The heavy gothic font of the German original was accompanied by the ghostly script of her English translation, written with a pencil stub.
Donner includes an image of that page in “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” a book about Harnack’s life and death that turns out to be wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography.
more here.