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City of women by David R. Gillham
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City of women (edition 2012)

by David R. Gillham

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1,0139220,254 (3.76)83
Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family.
Member:zoomball
Title:City of women
Authors:David R. Gillham
Info:New York : Amy Einhorn Books, c2012.
Collections:Historical Fiction, Yuck
Rating:**
Tags:None

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City of Women by David R. Gillham

  1. 10
    Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (pdebolt)
  2. 10
    A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Marta Hillers (betsytacy)
    betsytacy: After reading Gillham's novel about a German woman's life in Berlin at the height of World War II, including her affair with a Jewish man and her growing involvement in hiding Jewish residents, turn to A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary account of a woman's struggle to survive the Russian occupation of Berlin at the end of the war.… (more)
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» See also 83 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 93 (next | show all)
I get that people liked the setting (certainly many things were well-written), and I get that the suspense is well-done, but... well, you kinda picked a suspense-guaranteed setting. Is it worth getting a ground-level discussion of complicity wrapped into a story that will keep people reading? Does that redeem the use of a complicated, terrible piece of history as a sexy backdrop? I don't know, but I have a bit of that fast-food aftertaste that sometimes accompanies popular cinema, as if I've been cheated.

I see reading here that I should have expected a romance/thriller, but this book was passed on to me and I never read the back. I thought, instead, I'd get stories about the women in Berlin, with realistic perspectives. Here I was unequivocally disappointed. ( )
  Kiramke | Jun 27, 2023 |
Very good writing.WWII novel of Berlin where married aryan woman falls in love with Jewish man. At the same time she inadvertently becomes involved in hiding Jews. This book has more sex scenes than I need to read and the love between Sigurd and Econ seems more like lust, but it’s another facet of WWII and reads well. ( )
  bereanna | Jun 18, 2020 |
I really liked this novel. First of all, the characters are realistic, even if not really likable (that being said, I did like Sigrid). There's no sugarcoating, especially of the main heroine, whose motivations are often obscured, but this does not mean they are less believable. I actually thought this is what it would probably be like for the most, and is kind of refreshing after reading dozens of novels where similar characters working for the resistance seem to be the embodiment of heroism and nobility.

The whole atmosphere of the wartime Berlin is depicted wonderfully, full of disillusioned inhabitants still gripping on to the empty promises of a great victory which would never happen.

The love story was a bit of a drag, with Sigrid constantly coming back to her cruel lover who was simply using her all the time. But if he hadn't been like this, the story would have less depth and would be a lot more melodramatic. I think it gave this extra dimension to her character, reminding me of Sylvia Plath's Daddy, Sigrid having fallen for a man who is, simply put, a brute (no matter the circumstances).

On the other hand, I felt like Sigrid was too lucky. In reality, it is very unlikely she would so easily get out of all the troubles the way she did in this story. This was a little too much, even if allow for the licentia poetica. Also, the end of the novel left a lot to be desired. The stories of some of the more interesting characters felt unfinished. Also, by the end of the novel I really wanted to know what would happen to Sigrid after, would she live to see the end of the war in Berlin and the Soviet invasion together with the atrocities German women had to endure later on. ( )
  ZeljanaMaricFerli | Feb 20, 2020 |
This isn't a typical read for me--this is straight historical fiction, and a novel about Germany during World War II, which has been covered over and over again. Gillham, like many before him, asks his readers: what would you do? And why?

That last question is ultimately the more interesting one, I think. Sigrid Schroeder is a woman hiding anger in heart and Jews in an attic, who sleeps with men who are not her husband but is offended when she finds her young neighbor to have posed for a deck of salacious playing cards. Yes, she grapples with the distinction between a good war-time German and a good person. What it means to betray an extinguished marriage. But she also considers some terribly cruel actions for equally terribly understandable reasons.

In a book about Nazi Germany, it's easy to resort to stereotypes. But Gillham has done anything but--his people are well-considered and deeply convincing. ( )
  prufrockcoat | Dec 3, 2019 |
This is an exciting book with all the fear and suspicion of Hitler's Berlin during WWII. It follows Sigrid, who is dragged unwillingly into a situation that changes her life for better or worse. It was very well written, with the action keeping the book moving forward at a steady pace but not so fast that your head is spinning.

* I received this book for free from Goodreads First Reads. ( )
  carliwi | Sep 23, 2019 |
Showing 1-5 of 93 (next | show all)
This is a shopworn premise, but Gillham has two great strengths that elevate his story. The first is his hard-won command of Berlin in 1943, its geography, its restaurants and hotels, even its language. (There are German words on nearly every page, but they seem authentic, never showy.) Second, and more significantly, his characters suffer from the full moral complexity of their time. A woman and a man, of whose integrity we have been sure, betray their friends not out of evil, but because they face impossible dilemmas, what the Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer has called "choiceless choices" — while the book's villains have flashes of crabby, unexpected selflessness.
added by ozzer | editUSA Today, Charles Finch (Aug 6, 2012)
 
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Epigraph
"Take hold of kettle, broom, and pan, then you'll surely get a man! Shop and office leave alone, Your true life's work lies at home." -Common German rhyme of the 1930s

"Who will ever ask in three or five hundred years' time whether a Fraulein Muller or Schulze was unhappy?" -Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS and Chief of the German police, circa 1941
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To Ludmilla
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The blind man taps his cane rhythmically.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family.

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Sigrid Schroder is the model German soldier's wife during World War II, except for one secret, she misses her Jewish lover, but she is not the only one with secrets, and she must choose to act on what is right and what is wrong and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two when the carefully constructed fortress of solitude she has built over the years begins to collapse.
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