A novel that rings powerfully true, a rich and remarkable portrait of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.In his portrait of a Berlin family during the turbulent years of the first half of the century, Len Deighton has created a compelling study of the rise of Nazi Germany.With its meticulous research, rich detail and brilliantly drawn cast of characters, Winter is a superbly realized achievement.

    The Danzig Trilogy contains three of the author's most acclaimed works.The Tin DrumAcclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition of the modern world.Cat and MouseThe provocative story centers on the narrator's vivid recollection of a boyhood scene in which a black cat is provoked to pounce on his friend Mahlke's "mouse"--his prominent Adam's apple. This incident sets off a wild series of utterly "Grassian" events that ultimately leads to Mahlke's becoming a national hero. Because of Grass's singular storytelling virtuosity, ICat and Mouse/I is marvelously entertaining, powerful, and full of funny episodes.Dog YearsIn this vast novel, packed with incident, Günter Grass traces the dark labyrinth of the German mentality as it developed during the rise, fall, and aftermath of the Third Reich.

    Rudiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--and explores the sources of his profound alienation from their "secularized religion of reason." He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer's personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mother's literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethe's Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethe's Weimar, Hegel's Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of "weeping and gnashing of teeth," during the heady "wild years" of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauer's refusal to seek salvation through history.The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.

    The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modern Cartesian tradition: the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufkl�rung, the completion of Kant's philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism.Thanks to Frederick C. Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of Kant's critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present.

    Why did the judges, lawyers, and law professors of a civilized state succumb to a lawless regime? What happened to liberalism and the rule of law under the Third Reich? How many of the legal institutions and how much of their personnel carried over to the West German state after World War II?

    Painting in a very realistic, almost photographic style, he chose as subjects the poverty, violence, death, and war that he experienced as a soldier in World War I. After this terrible experience, he painted the famous triptych The War. Dix staged the world as a play, a grotesque farce. But the form he chose to do so was based on the classical canon of beauty. Dix lived his life and served art, for he adhered to the age-old rule that the American painter Ad Reinhardt put in a nutshell: Life is life, and art is art.

    Walker explores Berlin's dissident mood in the company of friends from both sides, some of whom are wall-jumpers and all of whom cannot help but wonder which side is better.

    A former Jewish resistance fighter and double agent offers a compelling account of her work against the Nazis in her native Belgium, explaining how she penetrated Gestapo headquarters and gained information used in the rescue of Jews and Allied POWs.

    The personality of Hitler himself, however, can scarcely explain this immense popularity or his political effectiveness in the 1930s and '40s. His hold over the German people lay rather in the hopes and perceptions of the millions who adored him.Based largely on the reports of government officials, party agencies, and political opponents, Ian Kershaw's groundbreaking study charts the creation, growth, and decline of the "Hitler myth." He demonstrates how the manufactured "Fuhrer-cult" served as a crucial integrating force within the Third Reich and a vital element in the attainment of Nazi political aims. Masters of the new techniques of propaganda, the Nazis used "image-building" to exploit the beliefs, phobias, and prejudices of the day. Kershaw greatly enhances our understanding of the German people's attitudes and behavior under Nazi rule and the psychology behind their adulation of Hitler.

    I have sought to capture the drama of that traumatic moment, as well as to tell the story of the Wall, and of the circumstances that led up to and grew from the construction of that gruesome monument to human discord.’ Grim and forbidding, the Wall snaked through the city of Berlin like the backdrop to a nightmare. Tears have been shed here, curses uttered, threats snarled, blood spilled, lives snuffed out. The Berlin Wall was an awkward thing, outlandish and unloved, a barrier planted clear across the middle of the largest city between Paris and Moscow. It was the most dramatic example of the political architecture of modern times. Norman Gelb, writing before the Wall came down, tells how the Wall grew from the confusions of the post-war years. How the Soviet Union and the Western powers shared an uneasy occupation of the capital city of their humbled wartime enemy, and how the Berlin Wall set the stage for the Cold War. He describes the grim episodes on the way towards the final division of the city — the Berlin blockade, the bloody East Berlin workers’ uprising, and the mass migration westward of East German refugees through Berlin. He shows how this humiliating exodus, which threatened the stability of the entire Soviet East European empire, could be stopped only by the building of the Berlin Wall. The story is one of power politics and global brinkmanship, of hawks and doves, of brilliant calculation and an intelligence failure of dazzling proportions. It is about the confrontation over Berlin between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev — two of the most exciting political personalities — and about how the building of the Wall graduated into a nuclear showdown between the superpowers. Norman Gelb was there on that August night when Berlin was broken in two, and his personal experiences help define the tragedy of the divided city. Though it represented failure to both sides, the Berlin Wall dissected one of the great cities of Europe, enfolding and quarantining the only island of political freedom to survive behind Communist lines. Praise for The Berlin Wall ‘A solid documentary history, told in fine style.’ – Kirkus Reviews ‘nicely evokes the mood of the city and the face-off between Moscow and Washington that many feared might lead to war. He switches deftly between the grand dramas that were played out in Washington and Moscow and the fears and not inconsiderable heroism of the Berliners themselves.’ – New York Times Praise for Scramble ‘We now have an accurate account It is the first one to get it right’. — Group Captain Dennis David ‘Deftly combining interviews, speeches, news reports, military communications and occasional unobtrusive narrative, Gelb presents a many-sided picture of war that reflects the feeling of the battle’ — New York Times Praise for Dunkirk “Norman Gelb demonstrates in Dunkirk how productive it is to focus on an individual operation or battle … Dunkirk is both a good adventure read and an instructive case study yielding modern lessons.

    

    Concepts are explained in step-by-step fashion. The book is designed to enhance comprehension. Exercises now include more contextualized practice of grammer points and are more consistent in length. It also includes an Appendix which covers information on German spelling reforms. Features exercises that are in natural German, frequently in conversational form. Provides quick-reference footnotes for words presumed to be unknown. For anyone interested in the German language.

    Together, Asplund and Lewerentz collaborated on the development of the Woodland Cemetery. Their buildings were profoundly personal; and while their output was not large, it covered a wide range of design, from furniture to landscape. Asplund gained immediate fame and success, inspiring others and attracting disciples, but the uncompromising and solitary Lewerentz has been recognized only recently. Janne Ahlin's is the first major study of this enigmatic figure who was an early force in the shaping of modern architecture.Lewerentz's work is presented in over 300 black and white and full color illustrations; the drawings and watercolors are particularly revealing as he rarely wrote or talked about his projects. It includes an astonishing variety of projects simple worker's housing and aristocratic homes, factories, churches, cemeteries, office buildings, store interiors, furniture, town plans, and ingeniously designed window and door fittings that he patented and manufactured in his own factory.Lewerentz, who was born in 1885 and died in 1975, began study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Breaking away almost immediately, he founded the Klara school, gathering an independent and radical group of architects who endorsed the use of indigenous materials and forms and whose concern with direct and authentic expression paved the way for modern architecture in Sweden. Lewerentz was in fact the first Swedish architect to work actively with the newly formed Deutscher Werkbund in Germany, where he became acquainted with Le Corbusier.The book follows his design career from such neoclassical projects as the Halsingborg Crematorium and the Woodland Cemetery to the more expressionistic banners, program covers, signs, pavilions, motor vehicles, and touring boats for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. It includes his contribution to industrial design and furniture design, his lighting fixtures, and a number of other glass products.Janne Ahlin teaches at the School of Art and Design in Stockholm and maintains an architectural office in Lund.

    Those in her little family were the last representatives of a town of twenty thousand residents. All others had been murdered, forced to flee, or starved to death. Despite brutal treatment and harsh conditions, the Guddats survived, escaped, and reunited their family, bringing with them to the free world a compelling story of God's marvelous grace.

    Trade paperback. Well written, often witty textbook discussion of the shifting trends in art in the mid-1800's in England, Belgium, and Germany influenced artists in France, and the social/political impact in France that came from this.