Lost Life of Eva Braun
Eva Braun is one of history's most famous non-entities. She has been dismissed as a racist, feather-headed shop girl, and yet sixty-two years after her death her name is still instantly recognizable. She left her convent school at the age of seventeen and met Hitler a few months later. She became his mistress before she was twenty. How did unsophisticated little Fraulien Braun, twenty-three years his junior, hold the most powerful man in Europe in an exclusive sexual relationship that lasted from 1932 until their joint suicide ? Were they really lovers, and what were the background influences and psychological tensions of the middle-class Catholic girl from Munich who shared his intimate life? How can her ordinariness and apparent decency be reconciled with an unshakeable loyalty to the monster she loved ?
Lost Life of Eva Braun by Angela Lambert
- Title : Lost Life of Eva Braun
- ISBN-13: 9780312378653
- Author : Angela Lambert
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press
- Publication date: 04/15/2008
Dismissed by members of Hitler’s inner circle as a “blöde Kuh”—a silly cow—Eva Braun struck an incongruously middle-class note in the feverish atmosphere of the Berghof compound. Braun was not a fanatical believer, like Magda Goebbels, or even interested in politics, and in this biography Lambert attempts a rehabilitation of the nice seventeen-year-old Catholic girl who met Hitler in 1929.
However, the reader recoils when empathy extends to claiming Braun as a kind of victim of Hitler. This misses the creepiness of her position, which is encapsulated in a story told by Albert Speer (and not included by Lambert) about perhaps the only time Braun stood up to Hitler politically: in 1943, she protested the newly imposed restrictions on beauty products. While Lambert may well be right about Braun’s personal demeanor, she never quite grasps her astonishing moral frivolity.
Angela Lambert was born to a German mother and an English father. She studied at Oxford and worked as a civil servant, journalist, and TV reporter. Her first book was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.