4 ideas
After the 1916 potato harvest failed under the Allied blockade, Germans lived through the winter of 1916–17 largely on swedes (Kohlrüben), which turned up as bread filler, soup, 'jam' and ersatz coffee. Blücher records that even an aristocratic household with estate connections faced ration cards, substitute foods and visible thinning among friends. Money and rank could soften the shortage, but they could not buy an exit from a nation-wide shortage.
In Blücher's diary, the cumulative hunger, cold and ersatz goods of the blockade wear down belief in the war among the people around her. She sets this alongside military defeat and the exposure of official deception, and presents the 1918 collapse as the product of these together, not of blockade exhaustion alone.
An observer who belongs by birth to one warring nation and by marriage to the other can see both sides' propaganda as propaganda. That observer is distrusted by both sides, but can record suffering on the 'enemy' side that neither side's patriotic narrative has room for. Divided loyalty becomes a vantage point: it exposes how ordinary people on each side are fed parallel stories of their own righteousness and the other's barbarity.
In November 1918 Blücher watched from the Blücher palace in central Berlin as the Kaiser abdicated and the imperial order came apart. She records red flags, lorries of armed soldiers and workers, officers stripped of their insignia in the street, and gunfire around the government quarter. Her diary shows how quickly an authority that had seemed secure stopped being obeyed, without claiming to explain how that happened.