In an interview shortly before her death, Traudl Junge, who had successfully applied for Hitler's private secretary in 1942 at the age of twenty-two, tells of the moment when her self-image broke down.
In Munich, the woman, who had declared her enthusiasm for Hitler by referring to her youth, walks past a memorial plaque for Sophie Scholl.
To suddenly realize that the student Scholl, who was almost the same age, had made other decisions in 1942 than applying to Hitler.
"I've often asked myself and found no answer, where the gentle and the good come from, I still don't know today and have to go now," says Gottfried Benn.
In a clinch with the often crude categorizations that had dominated part of social history, Alf Lüdtke had come up with the concept of "obstinacy," which can be used to describe individuals who behave differently than the blueprint of their milieu intended.
The term, which is not least important in resistance research, also appears in the title that Hans Magnus Enzensberger gave his dazzling collage about the charismatic head of the German army command in 2008: "Hammerstein or the obstinacy".
Among the well-known unknowns who negotiated the transfer of power in the arcanum of the men's room talks in 1933, Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein remained one of the most interesting figures.
In the circle of the most powerful men in the leadership of the Reichswehr, Hammerstein was one of the skeptics and opponents of National Socialism.
The cool contempt of the old aristocratic guards officer for Hitler, the story of the putsch that was being considered in 1933 are just as significant as the multiple connections that the colonel general, who was quickly sidelined, maintained with conservative opponents of Hitler until his death in April 1943.
The general's son-in-law, who spearheaded the 1920 Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, had seven children, among whom the sons have long been known for their supporting roles surrounding July 20, 1944.
Gottfried Paasche, one of Hammerstein's grandsons and emeritus professor of sociology at York University in Toronto, is now presenting a story about the Hammerstein family that was painstakingly composed over decades and that, with good reason, focuses on the four daughters.
What comes along soberly and in the form of a theory-free family history is sensational in content not only for readers who are familiar with the standards of the conservative milieu and the Prussian military nobility.
The dazzling self-thinker Hammerstein fascinates.
The range represented in the family and the amphibious life his daughters lead between incompatible milieus can be even more fascinating.
From the paternal official apartment in the Bendlerblock, paths led to the Wandervogel, to tenements in Neukölln, nudist camps, to high treason and resistance, to the artistic, socialist, Zionist and communist milieu in which the general's daughters were like fish, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say: how Whales moving in the water.
From time to time there is a discussion with Carl Schmitt
A photo on the book cover shows the author's mother in the early 1930s playfully posing on her motorbike.
The image impressively captures the streams of individual freedom that permeate the book.
In the middle of the book, a photo shows a man with the evocative name Nafta Nobel, the Jewish friend of one of the daughters, riding through the Tiergarten on a Hammerstein horse in 1932.
None other than Kurt von Schleicher was called in by the parents to torpedo the relationship with the Jewish medical student and later to save the daughters, who occasionally had arguments with Carl Schmitt on Bendlerstrasse, from being seized by the Gestapo.