For now, Clotilde maintains her father’s tradition. She visits the grave and ensures it is not entirely overgrown. She brings flowers from her garden or sometimes a special stone she has found on a trip. The original cross Franz Muller carved into the trunk has been absorbed by the tree’s growth, and there is a new one, a stripe he gouged into the bark maybe fifteen years ago, which itself has distended, but she can still find. Any passersby who might stumble upon the site would probably imagine it an animal’s grave or a child’s fairy house. Maybe they would stop and wonder for a moment. But most probably not.

When she visits, Clotilde follows her father’s instructions. In the dappled light beneath the tall pine, she tries to think of the varied beauties of life: the watchful way her dogs look on as she stands in silence; the sight of crocus heads pushing through the melting snow; the fact that human beings are compelled to construct cathedrals and sing lullabies and create art; that they devote themselves to obscure causes and esoteric fields of knowledge; that the world population grows by eighty million people each year.

She conjures these things in her mind and hopes they have meaning.

And she doesn’t say a word.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took me seven years to write, so first of all I would like to thank my family—my children, Tilde, Helen, and William, for hanging in there through the ups and downs of writing and long hours in the library; and my husband, Preble, for his patience and kindness, his first readings, and his belief in me.

I couldn’t have written this book without the many hours of interviews I conducted with my grandmother, and without the stories my mother told me when I was a girl and that my aunt, Annegret Falter, continued telling me after my mother died.

This book also would not exist without the recollections and insights many others shared with me. First and foremost, I’d like to thank Dorothea von Haeften for sharing her own mother’s story and memoir, and for generally introducing me to the story of the courageous men and women of the German Resistance. And Annegret Falter, for not only telling me stories but answering a million questions, tracking down facts, and helping connect the pieces. Friedrich-Christoph von Saldern and Ellen von Winterfeld, Mechtilt Reike, Heidewig Ellerman, and Constanze von Salmuth (through her film) all offered their memories to me. My father, John, believed in this book from the beginning and provided acute insights as a reader and sounding board. Petra and Jürgen Schrewe have always generously opened their home to me.

I am indebted to a great many histories, films, and memoirs as well. Frauen by Alison Owings, Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, Black Earth by Timothy Snyder, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 by Mark Wyman, everything by Gitta Sereny, Victor Klemperer’s diaries, The Past Is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg, Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance by Freya von Moltke, Battleground Berlin by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, On Hitler’s Mountain by Irmgard Hunt, Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS by Gerhard Rempel, Courageous Hearts by Dorothee von Meding, Backing Hitler by Robert Gellately, The German War by Nicholas Stargardt, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest, A Woman in Berlin, and Hava Kohav Beller’s moving film The Restless Conscience, among many others.