... meticulous reporting and sensitive, compelling storytelling ... the gripping story of anyone navigating life in a war zone ... The structure of Inge’s War works brilliantly, moving back and forth between Inge’s life in the 1940s and O’Donnell’s contemporary action ... O’Donnell has told a riveting and important story, one that focuses so tightly on Inge and her family in its level of detail—physical, temporal and emotional—that it becomes universal. The reader can see these places, feel what these people felt, understand their trauma and pain. Living in wartime becomes palpably real ... By the time Inge reveals her dark secret to her granddaughter, the reader has slowly, breathlessly figured it out. It is just one more shattering detail in a life forever damaged by war.
... meticulous research. This compelling testimonial details the deprivations German citizens faced during the war and reveals a dark part of Danish history. The perspective is enlightening and the accounts of sexual abuse are timely to the continuing Me Too discourse. This memoir deserves a wide audience.
[O'Donnell] lets events unfold chronologically while seamlessly interspersing conversations with her mother and grandmother, both natives of Germany, with her own research and travel to important family landmarks in Europe ... O’Donnell provides thoughtful commentary every step of the way ... O’Donnell has created a story that reads like a novel filled with fascinating history and excellent detective work.
At turns touching and surprising, O'Donnell's work offers an honest look at how strength, weakness, and resiliency can shape who you are and who you become. Consulting both primary and secondary resources to support her narrative, O'Donnell conveys an understanding of the day-to-day challenges facing young women in the late stages of the Third Reich ... A welcome addition to World War II memoirs.
... not just the story of a life — it’s about the relationship between a woman and her grandmother, one in which O’Donnell gradually chips away at the wall of silence Inge has erected ... It is a moving story, sensitively told. Inge’s experiences as a young woman in Nazi-era Berlin, where she and her friends danced to jazz and swing in illicit nightclubs, are narrated with verve. The hunger and exploitation she endured post-1945 show that the years of reconstruction were, for many Germans, far tougher than the privations of the war ... One weakness is O’Donnell’s over-reliance on the testimony of her grandmother: it is essentially a single-source story, bolstered by a little archival research and references to standard secondary accounts. The problem with this is clear in her description of a crucial postwar reunion between Inge and the love of her life, Wolfgang: with no detail to go on, she 'imagines' the encounter, in a way that feels unconvincing ... Still, Inge’s War is a worthy addition to the growing canon of literature by and about the Vertriebene.
[O'Donnell] is an honest writer, who scrupulously avoids glamorising or exculpating her family ... In piecing together the way her great-grandparents and her grandmother navigated the war, O’Donnell paints a portrait of millions of unseen, unrecorded citizens: those who tried to keep their heads down, who did no active harm, but whose blinkered view, or eagerness to save their own kin, helped create hell on earth ... It is sobering to reflect that Inge’s reactions are of especial historical interest because, as her clear-eyed but admiring granddaughter writes, 'My grandmother’s life was not one of innocence or guilt. It was one of extraordinary events, of the things we do to survive, and how they shape our lives.'
... a fascinating book ... O’Donnell fills out her grandmother’s narrative through diverse research ... her pursuit of the truth – which includes her visiting all the places associated with Inge – is impressively tenacious ... Here and there she reproaches herself for the pain that uncovering the truth caused to Inge and others in the family. But through it she came to understand a grandmother who’d always seemed cold and aloof. And the peace Inge found at the end of her life – she died aged 92 in 2017 – came about, in part, because the burden of secrecy had finally been lifted.
... vivid and meticulously researched ... O’Donnell fills in the gaps in Inge’s memories with investigative reporting, historical research, and imaginative recreations of key moments, delivering an incisive and multilayered account of family trauma, the dangers of nationalism and anti-Semitism, and the plight of refugees. This exceptional account transforms a private tragedy into a universal story of war and survival.
... a wrenching family story that spreads across much of the landscape of World War II ... The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war. Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.
