Why on earth are you writing about Unity Mitford, I used to be asked in the course of researching her biography. All she ever did was to make an exhibition of herself as a Nazi and anti-Semite. Settling in Germany and learning German, she had picked Adolf Hitler up in February 1935 by the simple expedient of sitting day after day with a friend, Mary Wooddisse from Nottingham, in the Munich restaurant where he liked to spend time with his cronies. He sent Wilhelm Brückner, one of his adjutants, over with an invitation to join his table, and fantasy became reality. While peace lasted, these two ideological soulmates met frequently in Munich, Berlin, and the Eagle’s Nest retreat of Berchtesgaden. Eager to please and flatter him by word and deed in private and in public, she undoubtedly touched what passed as the heart of that emotionally handicapped freak.
Born in the opening week of World War I, she was christened Unity Valkyrie, both names loaded with premonition. Lord and Lady Redesdale, Farve and Muv to her, and their one son and six daughters were just in time to enjoy the privilege of the British upper classes to do as they pleased and plead eccentricity if they went off the rails. None of them ever had contact with the workaday lives of other people. Shifting alliances and enmities were the constant feature of a family so numerous and enclosed in itself; sister Nancy Mitford’s novels reduce this hothouse competition to an ongoing comedy of manners. One of Unity’s nicknames was Bobo, and photographs show her growing into a heavy blonde Valkyrie whose set expression conveys resolve to keep up with her more beautiful and more intelligent sisters. If she had any talent at all, it was for drawing. The sample of her letters and diaries that came into my hands did little or nothing to clarify how and why devotion to Hitler had come to fill her whole being or what she may have hoped would be its outcome. The language is embarrassingly childish, her writing unformed, with a line through the letter s that gives it the look of a dollar sign. She shows no powers of observation or description, and worse, no self-consciousness.
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