Best of
German-Literature

2006

Weeds Like Us


Gunter Nitsch - 2006
    Weeds Like Us is a gripping true adventure story about the author's own East Prussian family. The author's earliest years were spent in relative comfort on his grandfather's farm in East Prussia during World War II. For him, life in Hitler's Germany was the natural order of things. Then, in January 1945, just after the author's seventh birthday, the Russians rolled into East Prussia. Full of unexpected twists and turns, Weeds Like Us tells the story of what happened over the next six years, as the author's family tried to make its way safely to the West.

Final Witness: My journey from the holocaust to Ireland


Zoltan Zinn-Collis - 2006
    In Bergen-Belsen concentration camp he survived the inhuman brutality of the SS guards, the ravages of near starvation, disease, and squalor. All but one of his family died there, his mother losing her life on the very day the British finally marched into the camp. Discovered by a Red Cross nurse who described him as ‘an enchanting scrap of humanity’, Zoltan was brought to Ireland and adopted by one of the liberators, Dr Bob Collis, who raised him as his own son on Ireland’s east coast. Now aged 65, Zoltan is ready to speak. His story is one of deepest pain and greatest joy. Zoltan tells how he lost one family and found another; of how, escaping from the ruins of a broken Europe, he was able to build himself a life – a life he may never have had.

Into Enemy Arms: The Remarkable True Story of a German Girl's Struggle Against Nazism, and Her Daring Escape With the Allied Airman She Loved


Michael Hingston - 2006
    In 1945 Ditha was living with her parents in the small town of Lossen, in Upper Silesia. Close Jewish friends had vanished, swastikas hung from every building, and neighbours were disappearing in the middle of the night. At the same time more than one thousand, five hundred British and Commonwealth airmen were being marched out of Stalag Luft VII, a POW camp in Upper Silesia. Twenty three of these prisoners managed to escape from the marching column and by chance hobbled into Lossen. One amongst them, Warrant Officer Gordon Slowey, was the man Ditha was destined to meet and fall in love with. This book tells the extraordinary story of Ditha and the escaped POWs she helped to save. Together they embarked on a dangerous and daring flight out of Germany. As they faced exhaustion, hunger, extreme cold and the constant risk of discovery, Ditha and Gordon’s love for one another intensified, and so did their determination to survive and escape together. Michael Hingston is a trained journalist. He spent twelve years working as a general news reporter, crime writer and industrial correspondent before turning to public relations. This book is based on his aunt Ditha’s vivid recollections recorded in over a hundred hours of conversation between the two of them, as well as exhaustive research in archives to verify the facts.

Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig


Oliver Matuschek - 2006
    Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources, Matuschek recounts the eventful life of a writer spoilt by success, which changed direction under the influence of contemporary events, and ended tragically in a suicide pact with his second wife Lotte.

Kafka Four Stories: A Country Doctor, the Hunger Artist, the Little Woman, Report to the Academy


Franz Kafka - 2006
    These recordings, originally produced for CBC Radio's Booktime series, have a special significance since they appears to be the only English-language recording of Kafka material. Broadcast-quality production values, brief introductions and theme music enhance the presentation. The first three stories, presented as a miniseries featuring Kafka's work, share a musical theme. Scarfe reads all but the second story, which is brought to life by the capable Wetherall. Each is a tiny window into the soul of a character, permitting listeners to experience an event. The jaunty theme music of the miniseries might seem a bit frivolous to Kafka purists, but effectively establishes the mundaneness of these individuals' existence. For uniqueness alone, this item deserves a place in library and school collections, and for making the work of a master more approachable it is most welcome. (Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Stories, Political Writings, and Autobiographical Works: Heinrich Böll


Heinrich Böll - 2006
    He was one of the most outspoken of literary figures, the Conscience of Germany, if not the West, in speaking upon the hypocrisies of both denazification and the wonder of German economic recovery during the 1950s. A wounded soldier himself, Böll was a champion of individual rights over the authority of the State. The year he won the Nobel Prize, there were also calls to revoke the award following Böll's article in Der Spiegel in defense of the constitutional rights or a terrorist group.

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-11


Edmund Husserl - 2006
    Husserl highly regarded his work "The Basic Problems of Phenomenology" as basic for his theory of the phenomenological reduction. He considered this work as equally fundamental for the theory of empathy and intersubjectivity and for his theory of the life-world. Further, with the appendices, it reveals Husserl in a critical dialogue with himself.

With Napoleon In Russia


Faber Du Faur - 2006
    It combines his detailed, accurate and compelling illustrations of scenes recorded as they actually happened with his vivid and gripping memoirs of the campaign. The result is a superb and remarkably detailed evocation of 1812, from the sweeping battle scenes which capture the ordeal of Smolensk and Borodino, to the day-to-day struggle to keep campfires burning and famished men fed. Faber du Faur's plates - admired and highly-regarded primary source material - are here presented, for the first time, complete and in full color. His moving and frank memoirs, edited and translated by Jonathan North, are accompanied by a detailed campaign history and biography of the artist. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is a legendary campaign and a captivating story of endurance, survival and the rigors of total war. Few of the 500,000 men to cross the Niemen in July 1812 were to survive - the French army was decimated by the advance into the heart of Russia, and almost completely destroyed in the epic retreat from Moscow. With Napoleon in Russia is a unique presentation of this epic and an unforgettable depiction of the horrors of war.

WWII Diary of a German Soldier


Helga Herzog Godfrey - 2006
    After my father's death, my mother spent many winters with my husband and I here in Florida. During these visits, she and I transcribed my father's World War II diaries into German from the old "Gabelsberger" shorthand, which only Mama was able to read. Subsequently, I translated them into English. These diaries fortunately were discovered by my sister Sigrid in the attic upon the sale of the old family home after my father's passing in 1989. She felt Mama and I should translate these books for the family. At a later point many friends and acquaintances encouraged me, to publish this diary, to document his thoughts, experiences, and innermost feelings from the beginning of his conscripted military service in 1939 through 1946, when he returned home after being released from a French POW labor camp. During the latter part of 1946 and into 1947, an epilog describes his daily struggles to return to normalcy, the resumption of his teaching career, and the search for food to feed his family. He describes his touching love for his family, as well as his anger and hatred for the insane war and its inept leaders. A war, he was forced to participate in as an ordinary German soldier. Many times he naively commented very unfavorably, sometimes using "choice words" about Hitler, the Nazi Party, and his superiors, a risk, if found out, could have cost him his life. I myself have many memories of the war and its horrors as a little girl without a father, spending night after night in a bunker, the "liberation" of our small town by the Americans. This has left deep and lasting impressions on me. Later on, I met a wonderful American with whom I fell in love and married, with my father proudly walking me down the aisle. This, in spite of the resentment he held against Americans, for shamefully turning him over to the French as a forced labor POW. I remember his sadness, when his little "Murschel," as he used to call me, left for America wit

Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12


Hermann Gunkel - 2006
    Even though available only in German, this work by Gunkel has had a profound influence on modern biblical scholarship.Discovering a number of parallels between the biblical creation accounts and a Babylonian creation account, the Enuma Elish, Gunkel argues that ancient Babylonian traditions shaped the Hebrew people's perceptions both of God's creative activity at the beginning of time and of God's re-creative activity at the end of time.Including illuminating introductory pieces by eminent scholar Peter Machinist and by translator K. William Whitney, Gunkel's Creation and Chaos will appeal to serious students and scholars in the area of biblical studies.