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Millions of readers and television viewers know the story (told in the tv drama Christabel starring Liz Hurley) of the beautiful, well-connected Englishwoman, who married a handsome German and went to live in Hamburg at the very moment the Nazis seized power. In her classic memoir on which the drama was based , The Past is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg told how she, her husband Peter and their three sons survived persecution, RAF bombing, denunciation and even Peter’s implication in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. However Christabel’s memoir is no autobiography: it covers only eleven of her ninety four years. This first biography of her will tell the full story of her life — drawing on new, key sources. Her three sons, Nicholas, John and Christopher, were ‘there’ in Nazi Germany before and during the war. They were ‘there’ in the post-war years of uncertainty and marital stress before she and Peter found a clear new direction for their lives when they began farming in Ireland. All three sons have agreed to talk frankly about their mother and father and provided free access to a remarkable archive of papers and photographs stored in their old home, Munny House in County Carlow. A second important source is a privately printed memoir by Peter Bielenberg. It provides new perspectives on Christabel’s narrative and even contradicts it in places. Making use of these two valuable sources, and the millions of words already penned on the Nazi phenomenon, the book will tell the story of a remarkable woman, and an extraordinary life.
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