Monday 22 December 2014

HAMBURG 1947 by Harry Leslie Smith

5 out of 5 stars

Non Fiction, Memoir, WWII

Originally posted on Amazon HERE on 17 December 2012



This is the continuing memoir of Harry Smith - for the first book, see 1923: A Memoir. It's about his life in post war Hamburg (as is obvious from the title, I guess!), and about the lives of the people he knew there, too, and the population of the city in general.

Within the book I read so much about the years directly following WW2 - things I never about, because those times are not nearly as well documented as the war years, are they? I hadn't realised how bad things were in Germany, or how much prejudice still existed, even though we were now supposedly at peace. Those years are shown through the eyes of Harry's girlfriend, Friede, much of the time, so I was made aware of how it was for the average person with so little, whose lives had been thrown up in the air by the war, and their uncertainty about the future.

The book isn't only terrific from a historical interest point of view, but it's also extremely well written - so much that I started the 3rd book in the series the minute I had finished this one!

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