A Conscience sparked plot against Hitler
Nonfiction
Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member, by Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, $24.95
In his memoir, “Valkyrie,” Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager says he didn’t know about Nazi misdeeds as a young soldier-recruit in Germany during the 1930s.
Yes, the Catholic Church, to which the aristocratic Boeselagers belonged, had denounced Nazism, but Philipp paid little attention. He did find out about Kristallnacht, the rampage against Jewish shops; but he and his fellow soldiers were sure that “the generals would act” to punish the hooligans.
Otherwise, his cavalry regiment, he writes, “was hermetically sealed off from much of the outside world.” But in 1942, Boeselager was witness to a horrific conversation in which a general calmly announced that he often ordered Jews and Gypsies to be shot without trial — that, indeed, liquidating them was his mission.
“This incident changed my view of the war,” Boeselager recalls. He realized that the atrocities he’d been hearing about weren’t isolated episodes but that “the state, as a whole, was riddled with vice and criminality.”
He and his brother Georg joined in a conspiracy, code-named Valkyrie, to save Germany by assassinating Hitler. The plot failed, but Boeselager survived the resulting purge of the army.
Before his death in 2008, Boeselager sat for long conversations with Florence and Jerome Fehrenbach, and together they produced “Valkyrie,” which tells the real- life story behind the Tom Cruise movie of the same name.
At the end, Boeselager lays out the three rules he tried to follow in his life: “to keep my political conscience awake, to respond to the call, and also to know how to say no.”
Fiction
Darling Jim, by Christian Moerk, $25
Dublin postman Niall Cleary has no idea what he’s found when he pulls a bulging envelope from the dead-letter bin. The signatory is Fiona Walsh, whose ravaged corpse was recently discovered in a prim suburban house alongside the bodies of her sister and aunt — victims, it seems, of a triple homicide.
Fiona’s handwriting, ragged and wrought, hurtles across pages stained with blood: “My time is short,” she vows. “We’ll die in this house because we loved a man named Jim.” And so Niall sinks into his chair, sure “he wouldn’t move until he’d reach the last page.”
Neither will the reader of “Darling Jim,” the spellbinding new novel from Danish-born, Brooklyn-based Christian Moerk. Aglow with fairy-tale inflections, this hypnotic, neo-Gothic suspense story heralds the arrival of an astonishingly gifted writer.
Jim has blown into coastal Castletownbere astride a comet-red vintage motorbike. By day, he entrances the Walsh women. At night, he unspools folklore in the village pubs: sinister legends of Celtic princes and deathless wolves, wracked castles and doomed love.
“In whatever time I may have left,” remembers Fiona, “I’ll always recall the hush that preceded Jim’s story that night.”
Of course, he’s not what he appears. Sly, wry and utterly original, “Darling Jim” is the stuff of alchemy.
