I want to welcome everyone to the first reading of the next book.

The book is called Lockade, the Diary of an Austrian Middle Class Woman, 1914 to 1924,

by Anna Eisenmanger.

This was first published in the States in 1932, and it was translated out in German by

Winiford Ray, who did a lot of translating back in the day.

So this isn't an internet translation.

What I will say is that people's, people ask what it was like immediately

after World War, one, what the Treaty of Versailles caused German, Austrian life to be like.

And my friend Mark sent me this years ago, and I finally got around to reading it.

And I think it paints a picture.

It's not very long.

And I think it's something that you can add to like the early gerbils diaries and other books about the time after

the treaty and what the you know what we'll call the Allies did with a blockade.

And, yeah, I'm just going to start this.

And it has a preface where she talks a little bit.

And the dedication is to all women in the world.

And, yeah, this isn't a feminist screed, although maybe some feminists would take it that way,

but the way we'll read it is how you would expect us to read it.

So I'm going to start off here.

Preface. Before me lies a collection of Little Black Diaries. Each of them represents a year and together they cover the period from 1914 to 1924. They contain a space for each separate day, but some of the spaces are blank. Often for a whole week or more nothing had been written. Other pages

are crammed with notes scribbled with obvious haste and frequently illegible, yet I have no trouble in

deciphering them. Every word is burnt into my soul what letters of fire. They tell of events and experiences

...