Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army.Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.

    The true story of a young German girl, Mercedes Simon, and of the American pilot, Gail Halvorsen, who shared hope and joy with the children of West Berlin by dropping candy-filled parachutes during the Airlift.

    Now, in this important work of historical restoration, Amos Elon takes us back to the beginning, chronicling a period of achievement and integration that at its peak produced a golden age second only to the Renaissance.Writing with a novelist's eye, Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons and activists. He peoples his account with dramatic figures: Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Berlin in 1743 through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, and went on to become "the German Socrates;" Heinrich Heine, beloved lyric poet who famously referred to baptism as the admission ticket to European culture; Hannah Arendt, whose flight from Berlin signaled the end of the German-Jewish idyll. Elon traces how this minority-never more than one percent of the population-came to be perceived as a deadly threat to national integrity, and he movingly demonstrates that this devastating outcome was uncertain almost until the end.A collective biography, full of depth and compassion, The Pity of It All summons up a splendid world and a dream of integration and tolerance that, despite all, remains the essential ennobling project of modernity.(less)

    Title: Tor! Binding: Paperback Author: Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger Publisher: Gardners Books Ltd

    A city of old women, black marketeers and sleazy cabarets in ruined cellars. In the British sector was Squadron Leader Michael Harrison, a war hero who had helped to bomb Berlin into fragments. He hated the Nazis who had killed his sister and her children. But here he was, doing his best to ensure that food and fuel was somehow brought in to save the surviving Berliners. In the Russian sector was young Lili Leicht, German, middle-class daughter of a university professor and now living in the ruins of her former home, trying to prevent her grandfather and two younger brothers from dying of malnutrition. Her mother had been killed by British bombers. As the tensions in the smouldering city grew worse, so Michael and Lili slowly fell in love. It was a love that surmounted all the prejudices and hatreds of war and offered a hope of understanding for the future.

    In this rich and wide-ranging book, Terry Pinkard interweaves the story of "Germany"--changing during this period from a loose collection of principalities into a newly-emerged nation with a distinctive culture--with an examination of the currents and complexities of its developing philosophical thought. He examines the dominant influence of Kant, with his revolutionary emphasis on "self-determination," and traces this influence through the development of romanticism and idealism to the critiques of post-Kantian thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. His book will interest a range of readers in the history of philosophy, cultural history and the history of ideas. Terry Pinkard is professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and is the author of the acclaimed Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, 2000). He is honorary Professor of the Philosophy Faculty of TUbingen University, Germany and serves on the advisory board for the Zeitschrift fUr Philosophique Forschung.

    A starling reassessment of Hitler's aims and motivations, Frederic Spotts' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics is an adroitly argued and highly original work that provides a key to fuller understanding of the Third Reich. Spotts convincingly demonstrates that contrary to the traditional view that Hitler had no life outside of politics, Hitler's interest in the arts was as intense as his racism-and that he used the arts to disguise the heinous crimes that were the means to fulfilling his ends. Hitler's vision of the Aryan superstate was to be expressed as much in art as in politics: culture was not only the end to which power should aspire, but the means of achieving it. Filled with evocative photographs and reproductions from Hitler's 1925 sketchbook, "Spotts's study of the Fuhrer's fascination with architecture, painting, sculpture, and music is ...elegantly composed and richly documented" (The New Yorker).

    ""This is Berlin"" gathers together two-and-a-half years worth of his daily CBS radio broadcasts that described the menacing steps Germany took toward World War II, just as America and the world heard them. Here is a vivid, compelling, and urgent narrative, one of the great first-hand documents of the Second World War. An introduction by noted historian John Keegan and a preface by Shirer's daughter, Inga Shirer Dean, put Shirer's life and work into context. "It would be almost impossible to overstate the importance of William L. Shirer's broadcasts from Germany . . . Mr. Shirer's descriptions . . . read as well as they were heard 60 years ago." ("Dallas Morning News") "Shirer's broadcasts . . . are models of eloquence and subterfuge . . . any reader will find it hard to put down." ("Publishers Weekly," starred review) "His broadcasts . . . have an enduring freshness." ("Sunday Times")

    As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics - Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis - as the founders of absolute idealism.

    Written in English, the book is mainly an account of his combat service against the Soviets in northern Karelia and Finland during the Second World War, with a shorter section describing combat against American forces in the Vosges and in the Saar-Moselle triangle in 1945. Voss also recalls his experiences of being a POW in the United States from 1945-1946, when he wrote his memoirs.

    Another recounts the pervasive fear of marauding Russian and Czech bandits raping and killing. Children recall fathers who were only photographs and mothers who were saviors and heroes. These are typical in the stories collected in The War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II. For this book Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, a childhood refugee himself after the fall of Nazi Germany, interviewed twenty-seven men and women who as children--by chance and sheer resilience--survived Allied bombs, invading armies, hunger, and chaos. "Our eyes carried no hate, only recognition of what was," Samuel writes of his childhood. "Peace was an abstraction. The world we Kinder knew nearly always had the word war appended to it." Samuel's heartfelt narratives from these innocent survivors are invariably riveting and often terrifying. Each engrossing story has perilous and tragic moments--school children in Leuna who are sent home during an air raid but are strafed as moving targets; fathers who exist only as distant figures, returning to their families long after the war--or not at all; mothers who are raped and tortured; families who are forced into a seemingly endless relocation that replicates the terrors of war itself. In capturing such experiences from nearly every region of Germany and involving people of every socio-economic class, this is a collection of unique memories, but each account contributes to a cumulative understanding of the war that is more personal than strategic surveys and histories. For Samuel and the survivors he interviewed, agony and fright were part of everyday life, just as were play, wondrous experience, and above all perseverance. "My focus," Samuel writes, "is on the astounding ability of a generation of German children to emerge from debilitating circumstances as sane and productive human beings." Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, a retired colonel in the U. S. Air Force, is the author of German Boy: A Refugee's Story and I Always Wanted to Fly: America's Cold War Airmen, both published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Fairfax, Va.

    With the Russian Red Army closing in from the east and Allied troops advancing from the west, Hitler forced the POWs deeper into the heart of Germany. Over the next several months these prisoners were forced to walk more than 500 miles through the severest of winter conditions, and hundreds died from exhaustion, disease, and starvation. Here—for the first time—interviews with the POWs who survived as well as their diaries and letters bring this astonishing tale of endurance and courage to life.

    Guiding our eye to revealing details, they also shed fascinating light on fashions and lifestyles, loves and intrigues, politics and people, and transform our encounter with art into an exciting adventure.

    His work, in its originality and impact, easily ranks with that of Goethe, Holderlin, or Rilke. Yet George's reach extended far beyond the sphere of literature. Particularly during his last three decades, George gathered around himself a group of men who subscribed to his homoerotic and idiosyncratic vision of life and sought to transform that vision into reality. George considered his circle to be the embodiment and defender of the "real" but "secret" Germany, opposed to the false values of contemporary bourgeois society. Some of his disciples, friends, and admirers were themselves historians, philosophers, and poets. Their works profoundly affected the intellectual and cultural attitudes of Germany's elite during the critical postwar years of the Weimar Republic. Essentially conservative in temperament and outlook, George and his circle occupy a central, but problematic, place in the rise of proto-fascism in Germany. Their own surrogate state offered a miniature model of a future German state: enthusiastic followers submitting themselves without question to the figure and will of a charismatic leader believed to be in possession of mysterious, even quasi-divine, powers.When he died several months after the Nazi takeover, George was one of the most famous and revered figures in Germany. Today the importance of George and his circle has largely been forgotten. In this, the first full biography of George to appear in any language, Robert E. Norton traces the poet's life and rise to fame.

    Distilling essential components of Hammer's German Grammar & Usage, this versatile guide for beginning and intermediate learners features two-color tables to simplify learning; varied, study-friendly exercises for grammar consolidations; a glossary of grammatical terms; and much more.

    Until very recently, the standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops, and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette, a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity.This book reveals the Wehrmacht's long-standing prejudices against Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks, beliefs that predated the prophecies of "Mein Kampf" and the paranoia of National Socialism. Though the sixteen-million-member German army is often portrayed as a victim of Nazi mania, we come to see that from 1941 to 1944 these soldiers were thoroughly involved in the horrific cleansing of Russia and Eastern Europe. Wette compellingly documents Germany's long-term preparation of its army for a race war deemed necessary to safeguard the country's future; World War II was merely the fulfillment of these plans, on a previously unimaginable scale.This sober indictment of millions of German soldiers reaches beyond the Wehrmacht's complicity to examine how German academics and ordinary citizens avoided confronting this difficult truth at war's end. Wette shows how atrocities against Jews and others were concealed and sanitized, and history rewritten. Only recently has the German public undertaken a reevaluation of this respected national institution--a painful but necessary process if we are to truly comprehend how the Holocaust was carried out and how we have come to understand it.

    The third ranking German fighter ace of World War II with 275 kills, Rall and his fellow fighter pilots were feared and respected in the war-torn skies of Europe. Now, with Jill Amadio, Gunther Rall recalls his years as a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe on both the Eastern and Western fronts in his long-awaited biography, Gunther Rall: A Memoir. Rall recounts his many dramatic victories and his narrow brushes with death, as well as his years as a NATO general and architect of the new German Air Force.

    How do trials, in turn, borrow their authority from death? This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice.Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically expressionless.Examining legal events that tried to repair the crimes and injuries of history, Felman reveals the juridical unconscious of trials and brilliantly shows how this juridical unconscious is bound up with the logic of the trauma that a trial attempts to articulate and contain but so often reenacts and repeats. Her book gives the drama of the law a new jurisprudential dimension and reveals the relation between law and literature in a new light.

    But by the mid-19th century, the emergence of massive armies and advanced weaponry - and the concomitant decline in the effectiveness of cavalry - had diminished the practicality of pursuit, producing campaigns that bogged down short of decisive victory. Great battles had become curiously indecisive, decisive campaigns virtually impossible.

    In GIs and Fräuleins, Maria Höhn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Höhn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Höhn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

    After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military.Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or partial-Jews (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals.As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the race of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers.The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous exemptions were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these exemption orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich.Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

    Arising from beliefs and states of mind, a variety of warrior styles manifested themselves in differences of dress, weaponry and fighting technique. Fully illustrated with over fifty photographs, this vivid and fascinating survey adds a colourful new dimension to our understanding of the history of Europe.

    None was more feared by its battlefield foes or more hated by political enemies of the Nazi regime than the Waffen-SS. Six decades after the last SS unit capitulated or was annihilated, the facts about many aspects of this organization are still shrouded in legend and half-truth. Loathed ... Full description

    Her unique ability to passionately transformdiverse subject matters into poetic language is revealed in this important collection of translated pieces. Her play with language is effective and at times transformative, as it expresses and exposes dangerous stereotypes and messages hiddenin the everyday use oflanguage and human behavior. Here, her readers will be surprised and frequentlyconfronted with Ayim's keen and powerful observationsof the complexities of life and the compelling richness of humor and irony within them."These poems [have] passion and irony and always a strong magnetic force...for even her humor, her playing with words and her punch lines never veil the strength of her protest against racism, sexism, and all the other isms that add sadness to our society. In May's voice, I found the echo of other sounds fromthe diaspora. Her unrestrainedness, her humor and lyric expressiveness equal those of Lion-Gontron Damas, one of the fathers of Negritude....An extraordinary voice.Unique and already in the hearts of all of us that are persecuted and fullof thirst."--Maryse Condi, from the introduction to the German edition.

    In this study of the desert war, John Bierman and Colin Smith show why it is remembered by its survivors as a 'war without hate'. Through extensive research the authors provide a compellingly fresh perspective on the see-saw campaign in which the two sides chased each other back and forth across the unforgiving North African landscape.

    • Takes a holistic view of psychological or spiritual illness and its physical repercussions. • Shows how to incorporate healing words into thoughts in order to prevent negative energy. • Companion volume to Hildegard of Bingen's Medicine, a collection of remedies for physical ailments (30,000 sold). A 12th-century mystic, visionary, and healer, Hildegard of Bingen recognized what the holistic health movement has only recently restored to our consciousness: that full health can only be experienced in a state of spiritual balance. Psychological trauma, emotional distress, and other maladies of the soul often lead to illness and chronic diseases. Healing the body begins with the self-healing of the spirit. Dr. Wighard Strehlow explains the natural methods used by Hildegard of Bingen to treat weaknesses of the soul--problems that are today treated by drugs such as Prozac. Based on his clinical work with this effective energetic medicine for more than 20 years, Dr. Strehlow gives readers a complete program for a lifestyle of "spiritual fitness." His practical suggestions are based on the integration of 35 spiritual forces of the human soul in order to "cure the soul within," which he synthesized from five of Hildegard's books on spiritual and psychological healing principles. He suggests that the recovery of Hildegard's insights into cultivating the health of body and spirit may even provide solutions to the challenges currently frustrating Western medical science.

    After his discharge he began a theater career, starring in plays such as The Coral, that subsequently led to a film career and more than one turn as a director. He became best known in Germany for his convincing silent film portrayals of sinister characters, despite his also doing "enlightenment" films made to spur social reform. He left Germany for a silent film career in the United States at the urging of John Barrymore. Veidt returned to Germany when "talkies" came out and his accent and native German tongue made it difficult for him to adjust.This work details the film career of Conrad Veidt. It lists all movies that he was involved in and provides a synopsis, cast and crew credits, and reviews of each film.

    Arguing that previous historians have confused effect for cause and have considered these conflicts without reference to the systemic problems that provoked them. Paul Hehn focuses on the fierce rivalries among the Great Powers in the relentless search for markets during the world depression of the 1930s. These rivalries were exacerbated particularly in southeastern Europe where Germany dominated the economies and trade arenas of its neighbors in a semi-colonial manner. In A Low Dishonest Decade, Hehn surveys the five Major Powers and all the Eastern European countries from the Baltic to Turkey. But he primarily canvases the economic situations in strategic locations like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

    Book annotation not available for this title...Title: .The Good Soldier..Author: .Novotny, Alfred..Publisher: .Aegis Consulting Group..Publication Date: .2003/01/01..Number of Pages: .160..Binding Type: .PAPERBACK..Library of Congress: .

    

    The complete hisotry of the Luftwaffe Field Divisions, of which 22 were formed, including Division Miendl and the smaller regiments!Hundreds of Photos, maps, line drawings, 6 color plates, orders of battle, etc!

    The study reveals new meanings of gender and identity relating to the experiences of men and women in early modern German history.

    

    More than five decades later, German youth inhabit manicured suburbs and stroll along prosperous pedestrian malls. Shattered Past is a bold reconsideration of the perplexing pattern of Germany's twentieth-century history. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer explore the staggering gap between the country's role in the terrors of war and its subsequent success as a democracy. They argue that the collapse of Communism, national reunification, and the postmodern shift call for a new reading of the country's turbulent development, one that no longer suggests continuity but rupture and conflict.Comprising original essays, the book begins by reexamining the nationalist, socialist, and liberal master narratives that have dominated the presentation of German history but are now losing their hold. Treated next are major issues of recent debate that suggest how new kinds of German history might be written: annihilationist warfare, complicity with dictatorship, the taming of power, the impact of migration, the struggle over national identity, redefinitions of womanhood, and the development of consumption as well as popular culture. The concluding chapters reflect on the country's gradual transition from chaos to civility. This penetrating study will spark a fresh debate about the meaning of the German past during the last century.There is no single master narrative, no Weltgeist, to be discovered. But there is a fascinating story to be told in many different ways.

    German historian Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred details how contemporary Islamist movements have been informed by the antisemitism of the Third Reich.Originally published in German as Djihad und Judenhass, this compelling historical account delves into the historical ties between Hitler's Germany and the growing Islamist movement in early twentieth-century Egypt.Küntzel makes the case that antisemitism plays a continuing, central role in modern-day Islamism, including the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.An important contribution to both the analysis of Islamism and studies of antisemitism.

    His early death in 1929 has long been viewed as the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic and the opening through which Hitler was able to come to power. His career was marked by many contradictions but also a pervading loyalty to the values of liberalism and nationalism. This enabled him in time both to adjust to defeat and revolution and to recognize in the Republic the only basis on which Germans could unite, and in European cooperation the only way to avoid a new war. His attempt to build a stable Germany as an equal power in a stable Europe throws an important light on German history in a critical time. Hitler was the beneficiary of his failure but, so long as he was alive, Stresemann offered Germans a clear alternative to the Nazis. Jonathan Wright's fascinating new study is the first modern biography of Stresemann to appear in English or German.