Return To Berlin


Book Description

'Return to Berlin' is the long-awaited sequel to Noel Hynd's classic million-selling espionage novel, 'Flowers From Berlin'.It is early 1943 and the United States has been at war for more than a year. William Cochrane, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who was the central character in 'Flowers From Berlin', has enlisted in the United States Army. He has the commission of a major and is at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, training for combat. Suddenly his military orders are countermanded by Washington. He is ordered to report immediately to General William Donovan the Office of Strategic Services in New York City.At OSS headquarters Cochrane, recently married, receives an assignment more perilous than combat. He is recruited into the fledgling wartime spy agency and assigned to travel to Europe. He is to make his way to Switzerland to meet with Alan Dulles, the Director of the OSS in Switzerland. There, if Cochrane is lucky enough to arrive, he will receive the second part of his orders: an espionage assignment. Under an assumed identity, Cochrane will make a heart-pounding return visit to Berlin, where he lived for a while in the 1930s. There is an assignment vital to the battle against Nazi Germany that only he, with his prior knowledge of people and places in Germany, can complete if he eludes capture by the ever-vigilant Gestapo. Or, with the odds heavily against his success in this assignment, will the assignment cost him his life?Rich in accurate historical detail, heavily evocative of the terrifying era, 'Return To Berlin' is a fast-moving action-packed thriller that will be one of the top American spy novels of Fall 2019."Noel Hynd is a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world." - BooklistRaves for 'Flowers From Berlin': "This espionage thriller follows FBI agent William Cochrane's efforts to stop a Nazi spy from assassinating FDR. Toss in a love affair with a British Secret Service operative and you have the makings of a page-turner. Complex in characterization, crisp in dialogue, and thorough in its background" - Library Journal"First rate!" - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer"A Chiller!" - Los Angeles Times"A Super spy novel!" The Savannah News-Presse




The Berlin Exchange


Book Description

From “the most accomplished spy novelist working today” (The Sunday Times, London), a “heart-poundingly suspenseful” (The Washington Post) espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War, when a captured American who has spied for the KGB is returned to East Berlin, needing to know who arranged for his release and what they now want from him. Berlin, 1963. An early morning spy swap, not at the familiar setting for such exchanges, nor at Checkpoint Charlie, where international visitors cross into the East, but at a more discreet border crossing, usually reserved for East German VIPs. The Communists are trading two American students caught helping people to escape over the wall and an aging MI6 operative. On the other side of the trade: Martin Keller, a physicist who once made headlines, but who then disappeared into the English prison system. Keller’s most critical possession: his American passport. Keller’s most ardent desire: to see his ex-wife Sabine and their young son. The exchange is made with the formality characteristic of these swaps. But Martin has other questions: Who asked for him? Who negotiated the deal? The KGB? He knows that nothing happens by chance. They want him for something. Not physics—his expertise is out of date. Something else, which he cannot learn until he arrives in East Berlin, when suddenly the game is afoot. Intriguing and atmospheric, with action rising to a dangerous climax, The Berlin Exchange “expertly describes what happens when a disillusioned former agent tries to come in from the cold” (The New York Times Book Review), confirming Kanon as “the greatest writer ever of historical espionage fiction” (Spybrary).




Return to Berlin


Book Description

‘Masterful, magnificent. A passionate story of survival. This story will stay with me for a long time’ Heather Morris, bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz on A Bookshop in Paris A young German Jewish woman returns to Allied Occupied Berlin from America to face the past and unexpected future. Young Meike ‘Millie’ Mosbach and her brother David escape Berlin just before the horror of Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister to follow them to America. But their family never arrives. After the war they return to a shattered city, hoping against hope to find their family. Postwar Berlin is a wild west where drunken soldiers brawl, spies ply their trade and ‘werewolves’ – unrepentant Nazis – scheme to rise again. Consumed with rage at her former country, Millie’s job rooting out Nazis from publishing seems the perfect outlet. But her anger begins to thaw as she is faced with the reality of what the war has done to everyone, guilty at their own good fortune. Everyone except for Millie’s boss, Major Harry Sutton, who seems too eager to be fair to the Germans and far too perceptive about Millie. In the rubble of postwar Berlin, Millie is forced to confront a devastating secret and find the courage to embrace love – and a new beginning. Atmospheric and page-turning, Return to Berlin is a story of love, survival, and forgiveness of others and of self. 'A deeply satisfying and truly adult novel' Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy 'A gorgeous, shattering story that could not be more timely about the dark damage of hatred and the persistence of love' Caroline Leavitt, author of Is This Tomorrow




Berlin Now


Book Description

A "longtime Berliner's ... exploration of the heterogeneous allure of this vibrant city. Delving beneath the obvious answers--Berlin's club scene, bolstered by the lack of a mandatory closing time; the artistic communities that thrive due to the relatively low (for now) cost of living--Schneider takes us on an insider's tour of this rapidly metamorphosing metropolis, where high-class soirees are held at construction sites and enterprising individuals often accomplish more without public funding--assembling a makeshift club on the banks of the Spree River--than Berlin's officials do"--Provided by publisher.




Leaving Berlin


Book Description

New York Times Notable Book * Named one of NPR and Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year * The acclaimed author of The Good German “deftly captures the ambience” (The New York Times Book Review) of postwar East Berlin in his “thought-provoking, pulse-pounding” (Wall Street Journal) New York Times bestseller—a sweeping spy thriller about a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Berlin, 1948. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment—to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Survival? Murder? Joseph Kanon’s compelling thriller is a love story that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.




Exodus to Berlin


Book Description

"Exodus to Berlin" tells the story of the migration of Soviet block Jews who were invited by the German government to come make a new life in prosperous and democratic Germany.




A Woman in Berlin


Book Description

With shocking and vivid detail, the journal of a woman living through the Russian occupation of Berlin in 1945 tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject and describes the common experience of millions.




Berlin Diary


Book Description

The author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers a personal account of life in Nazi Germany at the start of WWII. By the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Nazi Party, had consolidated power in Germany and was leading the world into war. A young foreign correspondent was on hand to bear witness. More than two decades prior to the publication of his acclaimed history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer was a journalist stationed in Berlin. During his years in the Nazi capital, he kept a daily personal diary, scrupulously recording everything he heard and saw before being forced to flee the country in 1940. Berlin Diary is Shirer’s first-hand account of the momentous events that shook the world in the mid-twentieth century, from the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia to the fall of Poland and France. A remarkable personal memoir of an extraordinary time, it chronicles the author’s thoughts and experiences while living in the shadow of the Nazi beast. Shirer recalls the surreal spectacles of the Nuremberg rallies, the terror of the late-night bombing raids, and his encounters with members of the German high command while he was risking his life to report to the world on the atrocities of a genocidal regime. At once powerful, engrossing, and edifying, William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary is an essential historical record that illuminates one of the darkest periods in human civilization.




Hitler's Berlin


Book Description

A leading expert on the 20th-century history of Berlin, employing new and little-known German sources to track Hitler's attitudes and plans for the city, presents a fascinating new account of Hitler's relationship with Berlin, a place filled with grandiose architecture and imperial ideals, which he used as a platform for his political agenda.




Walking in Berlin


Book Description

The first English translation of a lost classic that reinvents the flaneur in Berlin. Franz Hessel (1880–1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journalist Helen Grund was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim (made into a celebrated 1962 film by Francois Truffaut). In collaboration with Walter Benjamin, Hessel reinvented the Parisian figure of the flaneur. This 1929 book—here in its first English translation—offers Hessel's version of a flaneur in Berlin. In Walking in Berlin, Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. Hessel deftly weaves the past with the present, walking through the city's history as well as its neighborhoods. Even today, his walks in the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, can guide would-be flaneurs. Walking in Berlin is a lost classic, known mainly because of Hessel's connection to Benjamin but now introduced to readers of English. Walking in Berlin was a central model for Benjamin's Arcades Project and remains a classic of “walking literature” that ranges from Surrealist perambulation to Situationist “psychogeography.” This MIT Press edition includes the complete text in translation as well as Benjamin's essay on Walking in Berlin, originally written as a review of the book's original edition. “An absolutely epic book, a walking remembrance.” —Walter Benjamin