Showing titles in Germany

"Kein Volk der Welt hat erlebt, was dem deutschen "1923"-Erlebnis entspricht", schrieb Sebastian Haffner im englischen Exil, und Stefan Zweig befand, dass die Geschichte noch "nie eine ähnliche Tollhauszeit in solchen riesigen Proportionen produziert" habe. Volker Ullrich erzählt auf breiter Quellenbasis die Geschichte dieses Jahrs am Abgrund, das in manchem auf fatale Weise an die heutige Gegenwart erinnert.

For 28 years, the Berlin Wall was a symbol of communist oppression and tyranny. The barricade was built in August 1961 to keep East German citizens from defecting to West Germany. This is the story of an oppressive symbol — a wall erected to form a prison for those within its border — but it is also the story of triumph over tyranny when finally, 28 years after it was first built, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989.

Die Jahre 1919 bis 1929 markieren eine Epoche unvergleichlicher geistiger Kreativität, in der Gedanken zum ersten Mal gedacht wurden, ohne die das Leben und Denken in unserer Gegenwart nicht dasselbe wäre. Die großen Philosophen Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger prägten diese Epoche und ließen die deutsche Sprache ein letztes Mal vor der Katastrophe des Zweiten Weltkriegs zur Sprache des Geistes werden.

Richard Bessel, history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by "[A] band of political gangsters", came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst that plunged Europe into war.

In the wake of World War II, the European continent was devastated, and the conflict left the Soviet Union and the United States as uncontested superpowers. This ushered in over 45 years of the Cold War, and a political alignment of Western democracies against the Communist Soviet bloc that produced conflicts pitting allies on each sides fighting, even as the American and Soviet militaries never engaged each other. Though it never got “hot”, the Cold War was a tense era until the dissolution of the USSR, and nothing symbolized the split more than the Berlin Wall.

Tras la invasión de Holanda, los Frank, comerciantes judíos alemanes emigrados a Amsterdam en 1933, se ocultaron de la Gestapo en una buhardilla anexa al edificio donde el padre de Ana tenía sus oficinas. Eran ocho personas y permanecieron recluidas desde junio de 1942 hasta agosto de 1944, fecha en que fueron detenidos y enviados a campos de concentración. En ese lugar y en las más precarias condiciones, Ana, a sus trece años, escribió su estremecedor Diario.

History has focused on Hitler's use of charisma and terror, asserting that the dictator made few concessions to maintain power. Nathan Stoltzfus, the award-winning author of Resistance of Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Germany, challenges this notion, assessing the surprisingly frequent tactical compromises Hitler made in order to preempt hostility and win the German people's complete fealty.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

The author of the acclaimed When Paris Went Dark, longlisted for the National Book Award, returns to World War II once again to tell the incredible story of the youngest members of the French Resistance—many only teenagers—who waged a hidden war against the Nazi occupiers and their...

American journalist and author William L. Shirer was a war correspondent for six years in Nazi Germany, having a front-row seat to Hitler’s rise in influence and power. His most definitive work on the subject, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is a riveting account of life in the tyrannical state, a country transformed by war and dictatorship. The author was originally commissioned to write The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler for a young adult audience. This account loses none of the immediacy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich....

Persönlich aber unsentimental verfolgt er den Weg der Gutsbesitzerfamilie in den Westen und spürt dabei dem Verlust nach, der nicht nur den Betroffenen entstanden ist. Es entsteht ein Porträt der fast vergessenen deutschen Provinz, die in ihrer Tragik, aber auch in ihrer historischen und kulturellen Einzigartigkeit sichtbar wird – als verdrängter Teil unserer nationalen Identität.

Have you ever wondered how a man like Adolf Hitler could have come into power? How he legally became a dictator by using a democratic process? Or what events led up to his reign of terror? The answers lie in the Weimar Republic. Amid the devastation of World War I, Germany’s monarchy provided no answers. A democratic government seemed the only way to appease Allied nations and solve the many disasters that were already at the country’s doorstep.

"Aus dem Hintergrund müsste Rahn schießen. Rahn schießt. Toooor!" Jeder Fußball-Fan kennt diese Sätze. Der deutsche Triumph 1954 gilt bis heute als ein Wunder. Manche sehen in ihm sogar die wahre Geburtsstunde der Bundesrepublik. Tobias Escher gelingt es, anhand der legendären Weltmeisterschaft ein Stück deutscher Geschichte zu erzählen - schließlich waren fast alle deutschen Spieler noch als Soldaten im Krieg, fünf Jahre zuvor war Deutschland noch besetzt gewesen, von einer Bundesliga konnte man in den Fünfzigerjahren nur träumen.

Following the end of the First World War, Poland was wedged uncomfortably between the two dominant nations of Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland was obliged to plot and negotiate to try and prevent them from realizing their ambitions to eviscerate the country. As well as bitter ethnic battles between Germany and Poland for the political control of Upper Silesia, there were also the burning ambitions of Weimar Germany, and later Nazi Germany, to reclaim lands incorporated into the new state of Poland at Versailles.

De Eerste Wereldoorlog werd 'de oorlog om alle oorlogen te beëindigen' genoemd... maar dat deed hij niet. In deze beknopte weergave van de Eerste Wereldoorlog kijken we naar de redenen ervoor, de reacties erop, en uiteindelijk het overlijden van degenen die het grootste offer brachten. Zo vaak horen we over de grote offers die gebracht werden in de daaropvolgende oorlogen, maar het verhaal van de Eerste Wereldoorlog biedt een diepgaand inzicht in de omstandigheden die leidden tot de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined.

Sommer 1945: Nichts ist mehr, wie es war: In den vier Monaten von Mai bis September 1945 bricht die alte Welt zusammen, und eine neue tut sich auf ...

Carsten Dams und Michael Stolle untersuchen in ihrem Buch Anspruch und Wirklichkeit der Gestapo. Dabei spannen sie den Bogen von der späten Weimarer Republik über die Verbrechen des Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland und Europa bis zu den Prozessen gegen Gestapobeamte nach 1945. Entstanden ist eine souveräne Synthese auf dem Stand der neuesten Forschung.

This is the story of Germany after the Nazis, a time when two separate states rose from the ashes to face each other across the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, the people struggled to come to terms with both the physical and psychological impact of defeat, as well as guilt for the monstrous acts that had been committed under Hitler's regime.

In the face of ruthless totalitarian rule, it is only the rare few who stand up at risk of their own life to do what is right. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of those exceptional individuals. Even on pain of death, he would not bend, he would not budge - this German pastor fought the Nazi regime with every fiber of his being.