Writing a biography such as the one reviewed here on Adam von Trott zu Solz, a major figure in the German Resistance against Hitler, always tends to defy precision and predictability. Life and the story of a life cannot be easily measured by the standard of scientific exactitude.

Among the German resisters to Hitler, Adam von Trott has become a particularly controversial figure. To begin with, all resistance against a totalitarian regime has to resort to camouflage and deception. As the “foreign minister” of the Resistance, Trott had to function in the most precarious position. At home he had to maneuver between seeming cooperation with the regime and the preparation of its overthrow; toward the outside world, meanwhile, he had to represent the official interests of the Third Reich while figuring as the bona fide emissary of the conspiracy against the Hitler dictatorship. This predicament haunted him and placed him in a troubling twilight. His double life was a peculiar challenge to him in which he proved himself as a veritable acrobat.

No doubt, the hazards in that “strange field of unofficial oppositional diplomacy,” as Trott's English friend David Astor called it, were considerable, and there has consequently been a tendency to dub Trott a quixotic person. But the very makeup of this nobleman speaks against such cursory characterization. Trott was a down-to-earth Hessian aristocrat. At the same time, his great-great-grandfather was none less than John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Admittedly he had, as his friend Peter Bielenberg remarked, “neither status nor platform nor funds” apart from occupying from 1940 on a junior position in the German Foreign Office. Yet he steered a distinct course, as he wrote to his father: service to the rights of the individual, that is “man,” had become to him “immeasurably more important than service to the ‘state’” which, he added, had come to stand for “arbitrariness” (p. 213).

Many hands have tackled the life of Adam von Trott. It has been characterized as having been marked by “troubled loyalty,” and at the same time he has been nailed down as a “good German.” The strength of Benigna von Krusenstjern's comprehensive work is that she has refrained from excessively prejudging Trott and made her painstaking research speak for itself—and indeed she has succeeded in making it speak loudly. It is not timidity but a sense of academic responsibility that has her time and again when in doubt defer to the weight of the evidence of the materials, however incomplete. The persuasiveness of this book lies both in the wealth of the materials collated by the author and the modesty of her evaluation. In this case the Rankean formula of history “as it actually happened” has proven its validity.

The wealth of the materials proffered in this book is staggering. The author's encyclopedic zest has adduced many materials hitherto unknown. Where would you find in a book on an unfailing foe of the “Führer” the puzzling and perturbing statement, his reference, at seventeen years old, to Hitler as an “impressive fellow” (ein ganzer Kerl) (p. 88)?

Masterful in this book are the profiles of some of the dramatis personae. Relations between the two friends in the Kreisau group, Helmuth James von Moltke and Adam von Trott, quite apart from their well-known differences over the question of tyrannicide, were not always easy, with Moltke tending to be “overbearing” and Trott in turn reacting “irritably” and “vehemently.” As for Trott and Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the former, a civilian through and through, was distinctly not a soldier. Moreover, unlike the Stauffenberg brothers Claus and Berthold, Trott never showed any addiction to their revered “master,” the poet Stefan George and the cult of the “Secret Germany.” His Germany was wide open to the world of his illustrious American ancestor and to his friends in England.

Official England, however, in no way answered to the overtures from the German Opposition. Prime Minister Winston Churchill's prescription of January 1941 that “absolute silence” was to be observed toward all unofficial approaches from abroad, and finally the demand for “unconditional surrender,” launched in January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Churchill, closed all doors to the oppositional “diplomacy.” Toward the Russians Trott's idea of trying to reach the Russian Minister to Stockholm, Alexandra M. Kollontay, evaporated in a never-never land.

But nothing deterred a man such as Adam von Trott from persisting in his efforts to reach the other side, and there his chief efforts were directed toward the Ecumenical movement. Adam's mother had close ties to the provisional World Council of Churches whose General Secretary Willem A. Visser't Hooft, fourteen years Adam's elder, took a great interest in him. Their relationship became crucial for the young German Resistance fighter. Between 1940 and 1944 Adam visited the Dutch theologian in Geneva no fewer than seven times, presenting to him his vision of a “wider European resistance movement” aiming at a great European renewal. Trott's own ally in the German Resistance, Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell, a man of the older generation, did not share his “theoretical-illusionist” ideas, as he put it, and alas in Great Britain the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden saw in Trott “a curious mixture of high-minded idealism and political dishonesty.” For Eden it was “national interest,” as he wrote to Bishop George Bell of Chichester, that did not allow Great Britain to maintain contact with the German Opposition—if only, as he added tersely, “for Russian reasons.”

David Astor may have overstated things when he called Adam von Trott “a great European statesman.” Of course in that bedeviled situation in which he found himself Trott made his mistakes. His friend in the Foreign Office Albrecht von Kessel once said that Adam “went into the curve with too much speed,” and indeed he did.

Yet apart from all consideration of political power with which to measure the Trott legacy, there is another important dimension to be kept in mind. Trott was a visionary of a new diplomacy, indeed of a new deal, which in the struggle with the Nazi dictatorship was designed to put human rights, so much violated by the Hitler regime, on the map again. He saw himself engaged in what he called a “world civil war” designed to redesign the contours of “national interest,” yielding to what C. F. von Weizsäcker called all too ambitiously “Weltinnenpolitik.” It was indeed after World War II in 1948 that the United Nations General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Visser't Hooft kept his faith with Trott to the bitter end. And even if their views on diplomacy were at the time bypassed by the force of events, there is room for the historian to consider how much greater “political imagination” brought to bear on the Trott problem might have encouraged the German Opposition without giving up the principles underlying Allied policy.

Benigma von Krusenstjern's distinguished biography of Adam von Trott leads us, relying on her impeccable scholarship, to such reasonably speculative considerations.