Phil Leask weaves a detailed biography of a cohort of over thirty women from the town of Schönebeck near Magdeburg. The Schönebeck women, as Leask terms them, created an extraordinary collection of correspondence; a Rundbrief (round letter) which spans more than fifty years, from 1950 till 2000 (2). Leask notes that roughly half of the Schönebeck women, who were all part of the same school class of 1940, lived in Western Zones and eventually the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) while the other half remained in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (2). Most importantly, their lives and correspondence transcend periodization and geographic borders. Leask builds on his previous work studying humiliation in literature and writing as expressions of power, and uses the correspondence of the Schönebeck women to write a microhistory highlighting everyday life across the end of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi period, occupied and then divided Germany, and unified Germany after 1989. As with many biographies, Leask frames the book chronologically, based on stages in the women's lives, with chapters such as “From Schoolgirls to Young Women” and “Turning Fifty: the 1970s.” He drives the narrative with passages of thick description, effectively drawing the reader into the women's group conversations. With this combination of microhistorical method and biographical analysis, Leask demonstrates how these women's experiences transcend periodization as well as political and geographic borders. In the last chapter, Leask notes the internal structure of the group and its disadvantages in his discussion of one of the principal interviewees: “when the women died, the connections died with them” (289). In this important monograph, Leask preserves the women's connections to each other and reveals the relationship between their stories and their historical context.

Friendship without Borders exposes the rich content of the Schönebeck collection housed in Akademie der Künste in Berlin (Kempowski Biographienarchiv). Leask connects the women's lives to the context of major historical events, such as the rise of the Nazi regime and the Wende, examining the tensions between the tumultuous twentieth century and a group of women he argues explicitly self-defined as nonpolitical (3). Of course, Leask notes that even historical subjects who self-identify as nonpolitical are subject to the political context in which they live. In this case, his narrative provides ample evidence of the influence of the Nazi regime and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the actions and lives of these women. For example, he explores their experiences as members and relatives of members of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) during the Nazi regime (29) as well as their interaction as young adults with the authoritarian state in the GDR, most notably when notebooks in their Rundbrief were intercepted by the authorities (124, 176).

Leask's biography of the Schönebeck women contributes to the scholarship in a range of ways. He brings the biographies themselves alive through thick description, revealing the potential of this collection to bring a fresh perspective to the history of everyday life as well as the history of Nazi, Cold War, and post-1989 Germany. His methodological focus remains on the ability of biography as microhistory to reveal the dynamics of humility in female friendships and what these moments reveal about women's use of power over each other in both intimate and public settings. The Rundbrief is both personal and public, in that it documents the networks and friendships of the Schönebeck women as well as their keen awareness that their words could be read and manipulated by group members and state agents: their correspondence occurred in the space “between structure and agency” (Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig, eds., Biography Between Structure and Agency [2008]). Notably, Leask conducted oral history interviews with four surviving women from 2012 till 2016. Using the label “principal stories,” Leask makes excellent use of oral history methods to corroborate events and experiences in the Rundbrief while acknowledging the challenges of memory in the resulting sources (20).

By focusing on these biographies, Leask crafts a narrative that indeed defies spatial and temporal borders, yet at times this continuity occurs at the expense of a deeper analysis of the Schönebeck women's relationship to their historical context. Chapters are broken into subsections situating the reader in time and place, yet these sections would be enhanced by greater integration of everyday events in the women's lives. Two key areas for additional analysis include the repeated focus on what Leask terms the “Woman Question” in each chapter and the intrusion of GDR politics in the Rundbrief. Leask includes a section subtitled “Woman Question” in almost every chapter, yet this effort to draw attention to the letter writers' positionality as girls and then women in their families, communities, careers, and political context falls short. Despite this, Leask sets the stage for women's and gender studies scholars to analyze the complex gender dynamics revealed in the Rundbrief. The second area—the intrusion of politics into the Schönebeck women's everyday life—is particularly clear in the case of Erika Krämer and again in Leask's discussions of missing notebooks (210–212). Krämer and her fiancé experienced imprisonment and forced disappearance in the GDR, yet the women did not delve into a deeper analysis of her actions in the context of the GDR. Leask analyzes Krämer's case and the missing notebooks within the internal dynamics of the group, through the lens of humiliation. Both examples provide points of departure for scholars interested in Alltagsgeschichte of the GDR and the interest the Stasi took in the contents of the Rundbrief.

While no single monograph or scholar could provide a complete analysis of the range of historical connections laid bare in the fifty-year-long correspondence of the Schönebeck women, Leask creates a valuable window into their everyday lives and the significance of the personal for historical study. He brings attention to this unique collection, which will provide source materials for scholars and digital humanists interested in gender studies, networks, and text analysis. Leask's investigation of the Schönebeck collection is a powerful example of how biographical analysis contributes to new understandings of familiar contexts in fields such as the history of emotions, gender studies, and political history.