Purgatory of fools: A memoir of the aristocrats' war in Nazi Germany

By Tatiana Metternich

A valuable eyewitness account of life under Hitler from the perspective of an emigree Russian Princess This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812906918
• ISBN13: 9780812906912
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co
• Length: 283 Pages
• Weight: 1.44 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Purgatory of Fools deserves a reprint

Readers of Marie Vassiltchikov's "Berlin Diaries" will especially find her sister's autobiography an interesting read. "Purgatory of Fools" also provides a valuable eyewitness account of life under Hitler from the perspective of an emigree Russian Princess. It doesn't have the absorbing immediacy of her sister's diary, yet it makes up for this with an historical perspective which comes from writing thirty years after the fact.Obviously many of the same situations and aristocratic characters encountered in "Berlin Diaries" are to be found here, but Tatiana's own story takes a different turn from her sister's after she marries Paul Metternich, great grandson of the famous diplomat of the Congress of Vienna, and is separated from Missie for most of the rest of the war. Her own experiences after September 1941 center not on the July 20 Plot, or the bombing of Berlin and Vienna, but on managing her husband's two estates in his absence and traveling constantly between them. One of these is totally destroyed by Allied bombing, and the other confiscated by the Czech government at the end of the war. She evidently developed a deep love for this last estate, Konigswart, which is described as a palace and museum. Missie pops in and out of the narrative from time to time, but in Tatiana's book we get a far fuller picture of her husband, Paul Metternich, as well as of her two parents and other family members. The first seventy or so pages describe her childhood at great length, which includes her family's narrow escape from a dire fate during the Russian revolution, and growing up in various locales in Germany and France (mostly in France; most of their schooling took place at a lycee outside Paris) and finally a few years spent in Lithuania just before the war. The book is well illustrated with photographs. All in all, a great pleasure to read, and it's a pity it isn't better known.