I am a historian, and I am fascinated by the interplay and tensions between our moral and material lives. In my books, I try to recover how people in earlier periods thought about good and bad and why they acted the way they did. I try to understand how norms and customs change over time and how we came to think of our own as “normal,” which was all but normal not so long ago. I do not believe historians should play being prophets, but I do believe history can help us make better sense of the present.
In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by 2015, Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming nearly one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversial fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans reinvented themselves?
Through a range of voices–German soldiers and German Jews, environmentalists and coal miners, migrants and populists–the book paints a remarkable portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.
I found this book uniquely moving, gripping, and enlightening.
With his diary, Klemperer, a German Jew, captures the increasingly brutal atmosphere of Nazi Germany and what persecution felt like in everyday life. I admire the sharpness with which he describes the various Germans he encountered–and the range of their reactions–as the deportations and mass murder got under way.
It is a remarkable testimony to the good and evil in humanity.
What I admire about this book is the courage to break with the standard narrative of West Germany from 1949 to 1989 as a success story. West Germans did not just settle down in prosperity and comfort but had plenty of angst and fear.
The book does a great job of showing how we can write a history of emotions.
German Angst analyses the relationship between fear and democracy in postwar West Germany. While fear and anxiety have historically been associated with authoritarian regimes, Frank Biess demonstrates the ambivalent role of these emotions in a democratizing society: in West Germany, fear and anxiety both undermined democracy and stabilized it. By taking seriously postwar Germans' uncertainties about the future, this study challenges dominant linear and teleological narratives of postwar West German 'success', highlighting the prospective function of memories of war, National Socialism, and the Holocaust. Postwar Germans projected fears and anxieties that they derived from memories of a catastrophic past into…
As a historian, I constantly try to get into the hearts and minds of people in the past.
For socialist East Germany, these diaries by the writer Brigitte Reimann let us see what it meant to be a woman in the GDR, to live and love, to build socialism, and then, in 1961, to see the Berlin Wall close off one’s world suddenly.
I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men.
Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany. With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author's love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state's call for artists…
This historical novel is about a young Romanian German who is deported to a Soviet labour camp by Stalin after the Second World War. Herta Müller herself grew up as a member of the Romanian German minority, and the novel is inspired by her conversations with survivors of the camps.
What made this book truly spellbinding for me–in addition to the story–was the playful melody of the language. It is a reminder of how rich and diverse the German language and culture were with the various communities in Central and Eastern Europe until the Second World War and the deportations and expulsions.
'I know you'll return'. These are his grandmother's last words to him. He has them in his head as he boards the truck at 3am on a freezing mid-January morning in 1945. They keep him company during the long journey to Russia. They keep him alive - through hunger, pain, and despair - during his time in the brutal Soviet labour camps. And, eventually, they bring him back home. But when he does return, he finds that an embarrassed, traumatised silence hangs over his harrowing experiences. Even with his two friends, fellow Romanian-Germans who survived the camps with him, the…
There are plenty of books about memory politics and Germans’ slow and difficult way of reckoning with their evil past. What I really like about this book is how it brings to life these complex moral challenges through the story of a relationship between a younger man and an older woman who turns out to have been a camp guard under the Nazis.
The novel is about the tensions between love, responsibility, and forgiveness, but above all, it is about the difficulty of being German after the Nazis.
'A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' [Independent on Saturday]
For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems.
Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal. Much…
Susan Tate Ankeny left a career in teaching to write the story of her father’s escape from Nazi-occupied France. In 2011, after being led on his path through France by the same Resistance fighters who guided him in 1944, she felt inspired to tell the story of these brave French patriots, especially the 17-year-old- girl who risked her own life to save her father’s. Susan is a member of the 8th Air Force Historical Society, the Air Force Escape and Evasion Society, and the Association des Sauveteurs d’Aviateurs Alliés.
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United States history to earn a pilot's license, and the first female Asian American pilot to fly for the military.
Her achievements, passionate drive, and resistance in the face of oppression as a daughter of Chinese immigrants and a female aviator changed the course of history. Now the remarkable story of a fearless underdog finally surfaces to inspire anyone to reach toward the sky.
One of WWII’s most uniquely hidden figures, Hazel Ying Lee was the first Asian American woman to earn a pilot’s license, join the WASPs, and fly for the United States military amid widespread anti-Asian sentiment and policies.
Her singular story of patriotism, barrier breaking, and fearless sacrifice is told for the first time in full for readers of The Women with Silver Wings by Katherine Sharp Landdeck, A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, The Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia, Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown and all Asian American, women’s and WWII history books.…
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