On Hitler´s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood

by Irmgard Hunt
William Morrow; March 2005
288 pages

Rights sold to:
*German - DVA
*Dutch - Prometheus
*UK - Atlantic Books

Here’s what the acquiring editor at Atlantic Books had to say about this remarkable memoir:

"ON HITLER’S MOUNTAIN is an extraordinary portrait of a country sleepwalking to disaster, distinctively and charmingly told from a young girl’s perspective. It’s this striking combination which makes for an immensely valuable record of a type of wartime experience which has never really been aired before. Hunt’s access to a period and location in history that is becomingly increasingly remote to us today enables her readers to experience flashes of recognition coupled with moments that send a shiver down the spine. And then, to top it all, Morrow have come up with that fantastic cover and package."

A riveting account of a childhood lived in the shadow of Hitler’s famous alpine retreat, and an illuminating eyewitness account of the perils and privations of growing up in wartime, told from the perspective of a young German girl who was born five years after Anne Frank.

In Germany, ON HITLER’S MOUNTAIN will be published by DVA in hardcover as a lead title in February 2005. DVA will be bringing the author over to tour for their publication and will be tying their promotion of the book to the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Born in 1934, Irmgard Hunt grew up in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgarden, in the shadow of The Eagle’s Nest and just outside the fence that surrounded Hitler’s alpine retreat and headquarters. In this fascinating memoir, she offers an intimate glimpse into German life in the Third Reich, recalling an "ordinary" childhood in an extraordinary time and place.
Like many Germans, Hunt’s parents considered themselves to be moral and honorable. Yet they, like others, embraced the Fuehrer’s dictates and demands until his final days. Hunt paints a vivid picture of growing up in the firm grasp the Nazis had on every aspect of her childhood - from family to friends, school to church, songs sung to stories told. The model of a blond Aryan girl, Hunt sat on Hitler’s knee and stoically tried to accept her soldier father’s death in 1941. She joined the Hitler Youth at age 10; nearly betrayed her virulently anti-Nazi grandfather; suffered through wartime deprivation and postwar demoralization, denial, and guilt. In this important and precautionary eyewitness account, Hunt offers a revealing child’s eye view of a brutalizing time when a civilized nation’s moral compass broke down and its people lost their way.

Irmgard Hunt immigrated to the United States when she was 25 years old. She has been an executive at a number of environmental organizations, including the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Partnership for Central Europe, a project of the German Marshall Fund. She is on the board of ISAR (Initiative for Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia), an international NGO. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University (which she earned at age 52) and an M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard


STORY BEHIND THE BOOK:
By: Irmgard A. Hunt

I set out to write this memoir hoping that, especially in dangerous, fear ridden times, my children, grandchildren, people in the United States and everywhere might learn from the story of a childhood in Nazi Germany. It is evident that when Germans accepted politics that were exclusive, intolerant, based on racist ideology, and demanding unquestioned faith in a leader and a flag, democracy died and with it, contrary to expectations, the chance of individuals, adults and children, to lead free and decent lives.

One other reason for interrupting my environmental career in 1999 to begin the hard work of writing a memoir was that my children, especially my son, the historian, became increasingly interested in their mother’s Nazi past. Of course, historians have written countless volumes of research, documentation and analysis on Hitler and the Third Reich. Biographers, survivors, perpetrators, diarists in hiding, and novelists have presented the stories of concentration camp victims, Nazi criminals and power brokers, and of the famous among scientists, artists, politicians, and military leaders of the era. Yet little has been written about the daily life in Nazi Germany of the average, middle-class German family that considered itself moral, hard-working and honorable and whose adult members expected to live a decent, respectable life. It was those ordinary citizens who most wanted to forget the past once the Nazi years were over and who preferred not to recall their participation in the Third Reich. It was left to the next generation—my own—to seek to discover what people thought, knew, and chose to do in order to recapture and understand our parents’ and our own experience as the children of the thirties and the war.

Once I began work on the book I felt a sense of great urgency. With the passing of my parents’ generation, many facts of everyday life and people’s feelings about the Nazi experience are already lost. First-hand accounts by those who helped sweep Hitler to power and then supported him to the end were becoming a rarity.

Praise:
"One of the legacies the Nazis imposed on posterity has been a flood of memoirs, nearly all of them from victims lucky enough to survive the barbaric twelve years of the ’Thousand Year Reich.’ But the memoirs of ’good Germans’ are exceedingly rare. Hence Irmgard Hunt’s reminiscences, drawing on her memories, and intelligently eked out with her interviews with relatives and friends, are particularly valuable as an intimate glimpse into the Hitler dictatorship from the perspective of a young girl (she was born in 1934). It is a supremely honest, attractively written book, unsparing about her parents’ involvement (very low level) involvement with the regime, and her own awakening from the indoctrination she underwent in and out of school. It is the small details that would particularly touch a youngster mixed in with the major events, including her father’s death at the front, that give the reader confidence that she is being authentic. An important book."
-- Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University, author of My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin