There are many histories of Nazi Germany written with the considerable advantage of hindsight. We know where events were heading, we recognise the significance of developments that contemporaries could easily dismiss, and we inevitably read accounts of the 1930s with Auschwitz, the Second World War and the destruction of much of Europe already in our minds. Elizabeth Marshall’s An Accidental Brush with History is interesting precisely because it approaches the period from the opposite direction. Marshall was a young Australian woman living in Germany before the war, recording a society whose future had not yet been written.

The book draws heavily upon Marshall’s contemporary letters and diaries from her time in Germany. She had travelled to Europe in the 1930s and lived in Germany while learning the language. These circumstances placed her in the unusual position of being both participant and outsider. She was living within German society sufficiently closely to observe ordinary life, yet she retained the perspective of someone who had grown up elsewhere and could therefore notice things that might have appeared unremarkable to those around her.

This is the great strength of the book. Marshall was not a diplomat, journalist, intelligence officer or political activist sent to Germany specifically to analyse Hitler and National Socialism. She was a young woman getting on with her life who happened to find herself watching one of the most consequential political transformations of the twentieth century. The result is history viewed from street level rather than from the cabinet room.

That distinction matters. Histories of Nazi Germany understandably concentrate upon Hitler, the Nazi Party, rearmament, antisemitism, foreign policy and the machinery of dictatorship. Marshall’s perspective reminds us that enormous political changes are experienced by most people in much smaller increments. The transformation of Germany did not arrive every morning announcing itself as another stage on the road to catastrophe. Political symbolism became more prominent, attitudes changed, restrictions accumulated and behaviours that might once have seemed extraordinary increasingly became part of everyday life.

For me, this gradual process is the most interesting aspect of the book. We are accustomed to looking backwards and identifying turning points, but people living through events rarely possess that luxury. They encounter individual incidents without knowing which will eventually prove important. Marshall’s contemporary observations consequently possess an immediacy that a retrospective memoir written entirely from memory could never quite reproduce.

The letters and diaries are also valuable because they preserve uncertainty. That can occasionally make them frustrating historical documents, since Marshall naturally did not understand everything she witnessed, but that is precisely what makes them useful. Historical actors do not possess footnotes explaining what will happen next. Rumour, incomplete information, personal impressions and misunderstanding are part of lived history. Marshall allows us to see something of that uncertainty rather than imposing too neat an interpretation upon it.

There are limitations. This is not, and should not be approached as, a comprehensive history of the rise of Nazi Germany. Marshall could only describe the Germany she personally encountered, and her social circumstances inevitably shaped what she saw. Her observations cannot tell us what every German thought about Hitler, nor can individual experiences provide a substitute for the enormous scholarly literature examining the political, economic and racial foundations of National Socialism.

There is also an unavoidable tension when contemporary documents are subsequently assembled into a published narrative. The author knows how the story ends even though the younger woman writing the original letters did not. Readers know even more. A comment that may have appeared relatively insignificant when first written can acquire an ominous quality because we recognise what followed. That hindsight cannot be eliminated completely, and readers need to distinguish between Marshall’s contemporary observations and the significance we subsequently attach to them.

Yet this limitation actually points towards one of the book’s greatest values. An Accidental Brush with History demonstrates how difficult it is to recognise historical turning points while standing in the middle of them. Dictatorships are much easier to identify retrospectively than they are while institutions, social expectations and accepted standards of behaviour are being progressively altered.

Marshall’s later service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service adds another dimension to the story. The young Australian who had travelled to Germany to learn its language eventually found herself serving during the war produced by the political transformation she had witnessed. The contrast gives the memoir an unusual completeness without turning it into a conventional military autobiography.

The title is therefore particularly appropriate. Marshall did have an accidental brush with history, although perhaps something rather more substantial than a brush. She found herself close enough to extraordinary events to record them while still remaining an ordinary observer. That combination makes the book worthwhile.

I found An Accidental Brush with History most rewarding when read not simply as another book about Hitler or Nazi Germany, but as a study of how people experience historical change. Its importance lies in the small observations, the uncertainty and the accumulation of incidents whose eventual significance was far clearer to later generations than it could possibly have been to the young woman recording them.

For the military historian, there are books that provide considerably more detail about German rearmament, strategy and the road to war. For the political historian, there are more analytical studies of National Socialism. Marshall offers something different and, in some respects, more intimate: the opportunity to watch history developing before the observer knew what sort of history she was witnessing.

That makes this a modest but valuable memoir. It is also a useful reminder that the people who witness great historical events rarely recognise them as neat chapters in a history book. They simply wake up each morning and discover that the world around them has changed a little more.

Recommended, particularly for readers interested in interwar Germany, eyewitness accounts, social history and the experience of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary political change.