Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart.Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say.

    It is not enough to read it as historical—even in his day nobody wrote as he did...An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together...and driven by a breathless tempo.”—Thomas MannPeter Wortsman captures the breathlessness and power of Heinrich von Kleist’s transcendent prose. These moral tales move across inner landscapes, exploring the bridges between reason and feeling and the frontiers between the human psyche and the divine.The concerns of Heinrich von Kleist are timeless. The mysteries in his fiction and visionary essays still breathe.

    On one of her secret inspections, she makes a surprising discovery.

    With the Nazis in power, Kristallnacht in November 1938 made it unmistakenly clear that Jews could not survive in Germany. A few months later, Esther boarded a train by herself to travel to safety in England. This is her story.

    Urging her family and neighbors to leave a wretched hiding place during the liquidation of their ghetto, she and her parents and uncle spent a brutal winter in the forests and then joined a heroic Soviet partisan brigade. After the liberation, her family spent three years in a Displaced Persons camp near Frankfurt, and eventually reached America. But Sonia's life in her adopted land has been both tragic and triumphant. "Here, There Are No Sarahs" is co-authored by Holocaust scholar Fred Rosenbaum whose "Taking Risks" (with former partisan Joseph Pell) was praised by the San Francisco Chronical as "so extraordinary that it transcends the genre." As they were completing their manuscript, Orbuch and Rosenbaum discovered that a trove of touching family correspondence written in the 1930s and 40s lay in a closet in Argentina. The letters, some in Sonia's own hand, were copied, sent to the Bay Area, and translated. Several are published in the book's appendix, along with love poetry penned in the forest in 1943.About the AuthorSONIA SHAINWALD ORBUCH was born and raised in Luboml, Poland. During the liquidation of her shtetl in October 1942, she and her parents and uncle fled to the forest and, after enduring a brutal winter in the open, joined the Fyodorov partisans and resisted Nazi oppression. In 1945, she married the Holocaust survivor Isaak Orbuch and the couple had two children, Bella and Paul, and a granddaughter, Eva. For more than half a century, Sonia has been highly active in numerous Jewish organizations in New York and California. She now lives in Marin County and speaks about her experiences in schools and community centers.FRED ROSENBAUM is the founding director of Lehrhaus Judaica, the largest school for adult Jewish education in the American West. He has taught modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at several Bay Area universities and has written four books, most recently the award-winning "Taking Risks," co-authored with the former Soviet partisan Joseph Pell.

    Soon after joining the U.S. Army Corps, a wiry, baby-faced 17-year-old found himself a seasoned warrior desperately battling head-to-head against the Luftwaffe’s best fighter pilots over Nazi Germany. Having amazingly escaped the fiery wreckage of his B-17, he relied on his ingenuity and determination to get him through two bitter winters in confinement as a POW in the infamous Stalag 17. Along with other American prisoners, he was coerced to flee the rapidly advancing Red Army as the European war came to a close and endure a brutal 18-day march where he witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Weighing an emaciated 110 pounds, he was finally rescued by Patton’s Third Army just days before Germany surrendered.

    This new translation of selected letters and essays traces the life and thoughts of this extraordinary writer. Hölderlin's letters to friends and fellow writers such as Hegel, Schiller and Goethe describe his development as a poet, while those written to his family speak with great passion of his beliefs and aspirations, as well as revealing money worries and, finally, the tragic unravelling of his sanity. These works examine Hölderlin's great preoccupations - the unity of existence, the relationship between art and nature and, above all, the spirit of the writer.

    Captured by Nazi forces, he and his fellow group of Allied fliers were scheduled for execution as “terrorfliegers” and shipped in overcrowded cattle cars to Buchenwald—the infamous work camp where tens of thousands died of cruelty, medical experiments, and starvation. Once a simple farm boy focused on sports and his dream to fly the fastest, meanest fighter plane, Moser now faced some of the worst of Hitler’s ghastly system. From the harrowing and sometimes hilarious experiences of flight training to the dehumanization at the hands of Hitler’s SS, this is a story of quiet, steady courage sustained by faith, family, and the commitment to freedom and liberty in even the most desperate of circumstances.

    Stripped of their clothes, their possessions, and, in many cases, their families, they nevertheless held on to the hope of freedom. Despite the insurmountable odds against survival, these children lived to tell their tales in the second installment of the Whispers series.

    Instead, she ends up spending most of the next six and a half years alone in the Soviet Union, enduring the harsh conditions of northern Siberia under Stalin's Communist regime. Szedlecki's beautifully written story, which lovingly re-constructs her pre-war childhood in Lodz, is also compelling for its candour about her experiences as a woman in the Soviet Union during World War II. As a very young woman without family, living largely by her wits, she is only too aware of her own vulnerability and meets every challenge she faces with a fierce determination to survive. Throughout her ordeals she hears the echo of her mother's last words to her: "Be decent."

    Orders sent from these secret headquarters would play a massive part in the outcome of the war. Baxter not only utilizes published works, unpublished records, military documents, and archives on the subject, but also digs deep into the contemporary writings of Hitler’s closest personal staff, seeking to disentangle the truth through letters written by wives, friends, adjutants, private secretaries, physicians, and of course his military staff. Baxter extensively examines life within the Führerhauptquartiere, where Hilter planned and gossiped with his associates. However, as defeat loomed, Hitler surrounded himself not with his intimate circle of friends, but what he considered were illiterate soldiers. Baxter shows how Hitler’s contempt for his war staff grew, and describes, during the onset of the traumatic German military reverses in Russia, how Hitler tried to infuse determination into his generals and friends, despite his rapid deterioration in health.

    The Russian and the German, together with many other visionary painters in their train, hoped to pursue a new spirit in art. They wanted nothing less than an apotheosis of the spiritual in art. The outbreak of the Great War seemed to put a brutal end to what was at the time the most important avant-garde movement in Germany, but its influence continued unabated and inspired whole generations of international artists to create similar utopias.

    "Orientalism" certainly contributed to European empire-building, but it also helped to destroy a narrow Christian-classical canon. This carefully researched book provides the first synthetic and contextualized study of German Orientalistik, a subject of special interest because German scholars were the pace-setters in oriental studies between about 1830 and 1930, despite entering the colonial race late and exiting it early. The book suggests that we must take seriously German orientalism's origins in Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis and appreciate its modern development in the context of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates about religion and the Bible, classical schooling, and Germanic origins. In ranging across the subdisciplines of Orientalistik, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire introduces readers to a host of iconoclastic characters and forgotten debates, seeking to demonstrate both the richness of this intriguing field and its indebtedness to the cultural world in which it evolved.

     As told to her daughter, Gabriele Quinn, Ingeborg provides a glimpse into the world of a young woman who grew up on her grandparents’ farm with a pacifist mother and rigidly strict father; a father, who in order to put bread on the table, was coerced into joining Hitler’s private army, the SA. Reaching the age of ten, it became mandatory for all children to enroll in the Hitler youth. Ingeborg, like most children, enthusiastically joined to become part of an exciting organization. She was thrilled to march to the beat of Nazi drums. But Ingeborg’s family detested the Nazis and disliked her compulsory membership. In the face of this, her family resisted the Third Reich whenever they could. Aided by Russian laborers placed on their farm, one of these acts was to hide persecuted Jewish families in a simple hillside dugout. On January 30th, 1945, the Russians commandeered Ingeborg’s family farm, transforming it to a field headquarters for Marshal Zhukov’s First Bylorussian Front. Plans to invade Berlin took place on her grandmother’s dining room table. At this time, German citizens endured rapes, lootings and murder by vengeful Russian soldiers. Many were deported to Siberia. Amazingly, Ingeborg’s family came under Russian protection because of their defiant actions during the war. Yet, despite all good deeds, Ingeborg and the remainder of her family lost everything, including their farm, and were forced to live as refugees within dusty piles of broken bricks, sickly smells, and hungry survivors in the ruins of post-war Berlin. Interjected with historical chronicles, Ingeborg’s story relates how Adolf Hitler was able to mold an entire people into a machine of madness and how the sanity of the outside world finally brought it all to an end.

    This book provides vivid descriptions of events in the camp from the point of view of the men that witnessed them. Using interviews, personal letters, and unpublished diaries, some supplied by historian Marcin Zborska in Warsaw and published for the first time, Ian Baxter gives a fascinating insight into the camp that saw the murder of some 800,000 Jews. The book paints a chilling picture of the staff at Treblinka, showing the SS-men during breaks from their murderous activities, relaxing in their barracks, or visiting the camp zoo with their families. Diary extracts will allow a reader inside the heads of these men who, in some cases felt themselves fortunate to be posted at Treblinka. The inner working of the camp are exposed here in unprecedented detail—from the techniques of mass murder to the bizarre rituals that developed within the camp.

    Hesse explores perennial themes, from the simple to the transcendental. Because he knows of the awkwardness of adolescence and the pressures exerted on us to conform, his books hold special appeal for young readers and are taught widely. Yet he is equally relevant for older readers, writing about the torment of a psyche in despair, or our fear of the unknown. All these experiences are explored from the perspective of the individual self, for Hesse the repository of the divine and the sole entity to which we are accountable. This volume of new essays sheds light on his major works, including Siddhartha, Der Steppenwolf, and Das Glasperlenspiel, as well as Rohalde, Klingsors letzter Sommer, Klein und Wagner, and the poetry. Another six essays explore Hesse's interest in psychoanalysis, music, and eastern philosophy, the development of his political views, the influence of his painting on his writing, and the relationship between Hesse and Goethe.Contributors: Jefford Vahlbusch, Osman Durrani, Andreas Solbach, Ralph Freedman, Adrian Hsia, Stefan H�ppner, Martin Swales, Frederick Lubich, Paul Bishop, Olaf Berwald, Kamakshi Murti, Marco Schickling, Volker Michels, Godela Weiss-Sussex, C. Immo Schneider, Hans-Joachim Hahn.Ingo Cornils is Professor of German at the University of Leeds.