Politics and Culture in Twentieth-century Germany


Book Description

This is the first book to examine this crucial relationship between politics and culture in Germany, not only during the Nazi and Cold War eras but in periods when the effects are less obvious.




Broken Lives


Book Description

The gripping stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition—but also recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation Broken Lives is a gripping account of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did. Drawing on six dozen memoirs by Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives offers new insights about persistent questions. Why did so many Germans support Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi inhumanity? How did they finally distance themselves from the Nazi past and come to embrace human rights? The result is a powerful portrait of the experiences of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and out of the abyss of a dark century.




A German Generation


Book Description

Germans of the generation born just before the outbreak of World War I lived through a tumultuous and dramatic century. This book tells the story of their lives and, in so doing, offers a new history of twentieth-century Germany, as experienced and made by ordinary human beings.On the basis of sixty-two oral-history interviews, this book shows how this generation was shaped psychologically by a series of historically engendered losses over the course of the century. In response, this generation turned to the collective to repair the losses it had suffered, most fatefully to the community of the "Volk" during the Third Reich, a racial collective to which this generation was passionately committed and which was at the heart of National Socialism and its popular appeal.




Modern Hungers


Book Description

This text explores Germany's role in the two world wars and the Cold War to analyze the food economy of the twentieth century. It argues that controlling food supply and determining how and what people ate shaped the course of these three wars




The United States and Europe in the Twentieth Century


Book Description

The relationship between the US and Europe in the 20th century is one of the key considerations in any understanding of international relations/international history during this period. David Ryan first sets the context by looking at the trends and traditions of America’s foreign relations in the 19th century, and then considers the changing nature of America's vision of Europe from 1900 to the present. The book examines America’s response to and involvement in the two World Wars, including the structure of international power after the First World War and American reaction to the rise of Nazi Germany. American/European relations during the Cold War (1945-1970) are discussed, and Ryan considers the contentious debate that America was trying to establish an empire by invitation. Finally, the book looks at the ever-increasing unification of Europe and how this has affected America's role and influence.




Law, History, and Justice


Book Description

Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.




Voyage Through the Twentieth Century


Book Description

The account of the author’s life, spent between Europe and America, is at the same time an account of his generation, one that came of age between the two World Wars. Recalling not only circumstances of his own situation but that of his friends, the author shows how this generation faced a reality that seemed fragmented, and in their shared thirst for knowledge and commitment to ideas they searched for cohesiveness among the glittering, holistic ideologies and movements of the twenties and thirties. The author’s scholarly work on the German Resistance to Hitler revealed to him those who maintained dignity and courage in times of peril and despair, which became for him a life’s pursuit. This work is unique in its thorough inclusion of the postwar decades and its perspective from a historian eager to rescue the “other” Germany—the Germany of the righteous rather than the Holocaust murderers.




Hitler's American Friends


Book Description

A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.




America and the Germans: Immigration, language, ethnicity


Book Description

Unprecedented in scope and critical perspective, American and the Germans presents an analysis of the history of the Germans in America and of the turbulent relations between Germany and the United States. The two volumes bring together research in such diverse fields as ethnic studies, political science, linguistics, and literature, as well as American and German History. Contributors are leading American and German scholars, such as Kathleen Neils Conzen, Joshua A. Fishman, Peter Gay, Harold Jantz, Günter Moltmann, Steven Muller, Theo Sommer, Fritz Stern, Herbert A. Strauss, Gerhard L. Weinberg, and Don Yoder. These scholars assess the ethnicity and acculturation of German-Americans from the seventeenth century to the twentieth; the state of German language and culture in the United States; World War I as a turning point in relations between German and America; the political, economic, and cultural relations before and after World War II; and the midcentury state of affairs between the two countries. Special chapters are devoted to the Pennsylvania Germans, Jewish-German immigration after 1933, Americanism in Germany, and a critical appraisal of current research. American and the Germans presents a fascinating introduction to the subject as well as new perspectives for a more critical and comprehensive study of its many facets. It can be used as a reader in the fields of German studies, American studies, political science, European and German history, American history, ethnic studies, and German and American literature. Although each of the 49 contributions reflects the state of current scholarship, they are formulated with the uninitiated reader in mind.




Between Mass Death and Individual Loss


Book Description

"This volume explores the tension between mass death and individual loss by linking long-term patterns of mourning, burial, and grief with the short-term cataclysmic violence unleashed by two world wars. How various "cultures of death" shaped the broader historical relationship between the living and the dead in modern Germany is the main concern of this book. It contributes to a history of death in Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich."--BOOK JACKET.