We who are so cosmopolitan

Constance Graeffe (1874-1950), the wife of an affluent businessman and a mother of five, lived in Brussels during World War One. Her background was English and French; her husband was of German descent. The family’s transnational allegiances came under great pressure in the polarized atmosphere of a city under German military occupation.

Constance Graeffe’s diary, kept from August 1914 through December 1915, expresses these tensions. A private citizen’s attempt to grasp the war and chart her own course within it, this extraordinary document allows the reader to map the Great War’s impact upon a family.