While growing up in a Vermont town in the lower Champlain Valley, I became fascinated with the wealth of nearby historic sites dating from the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Within easy reach of our family station wagon were Fort Ticonderoga and more. I became especially intrigued by German mercenaries hired by the British to fight the American colonists. My interest led me to become a history major at the University of Vermont, and eventually to Germany as a correspondent for The Associated Press. I worked and lived in Germany from 1987-1997, covering the toppling of Communism, the birth of a new Germany, the rise of neo-Nazi violence, and other themes.
Like the Munich Post, Konrad Heiden was among the first explainers of Hitler. As a Munich-based reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitungnewspaper in the early 1920s, Heiden wrote about the Nazis in the early stages of Hitler’s political career. Heiden provides useful insights into Hitler’s mastery of propaganda and lies as means of controlling people’s minds, a topic that is relevant in 21st-century politics.
This narrative is based partly on the author's own observations and experiences. However, even the most intimate episodes and reports of private conversations are grounded on documentary evidence or on statements of individuals who seemed thoroughly reliable.
I was a law school graduate heading for my first job when, unable to think of anything better to do with my last afternoon in London, I wandered through the First World War galleries of the Imperial War Museum. I was hypnotized by a slide show of Great War propaganda posters, stunned by their clever viciousness in getting men to volunteer and wives and girlfriends to pressure them. Increasingly fascinated, I started reading about the war and its aftermath. After several years of this, I quit my job at a law firm and went back to school to become a professor. And here I am.
Fritzsche shows here how, from 1914 to 1933, middle class Germans were welded into the political block that supported Hitler. Another spellbindingly original book – among other things, Fritzsche shows very persuasively that the Great Depression had little to do with the rise of Hitler – the Nazis’ recipe of egalitarian but nationalist politics was already doing its work before 1929.
Why did ordinary Germans vote for Hitler? In this dramatically plotted book, organized around crucial turning points in 1914, 1918, and 1933, Peter Fritzsche explains why the Nazis were so popular and what was behind the political choice made by the German people.
Rejecting the view that Germans voted for the Nazis simply because they hated the Jews, or had been humiliated in World War I, or had been ruined by the Great Depression, Fritzsche makes the controversial argument that Nazism was part of a larger process of democratization and political invigoration that began with the outbreak of World War…
I’ve always been enamored with the World War II era. It was a time that seems virtually non-existent today, where almost everyone in my country was on the same page. There seemed to be a collective commitment to the struggle. An agreement that this was indeed good versus evil. Of course, I’m sure its nostalgic allure is much greater for those of us who didn’t actually have to live through it. But the strength, perseverance, and everyday heroism it brought out in soldiers and civilians alike, deserves to be chronicled and remembered forever.
Most of this novel’s action occurs between World War I and World War II. It’s the riveting tale of a young German crushed by his country’s defeat and dedicated to doing something about it. He joins a network of assassins and aids in the murder of a high-ranking Jew in the Weimar government. Sent to prison, he meets a unique individual and begins an acute reexamination of everything he’s previously believed. This is a passionately compelling tale of one man looking deep within himself to make sense of what he’s done with his life. The author brings the times, as well as his characters vividly to life and makes this chronicle of redemption a supremely fulfilling read.
Historical Fiction based on a true story of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Third Reich. Winner of 13 book awards.2017 Independent Press Award - Winner - Historical Fiction 2017 Independent Press Award - Winner - General Fiction 2016 IndieReader Discovery Award - 1st Place - Fiction2015 Nautilus Book Award Winner - Fiction - Silver medal2016 Readers' Favorite Book Award - Gold Medal - Fiction -Social Issues2016 Finalist - Grand Prize (Eric Hoffer Award) - Fiction2016 Honorable Mention (Eric Hoffer Award) - Commercial Fiction 2016 Finalist - First Horizon Award (Eric Hoffer Award) - Fiction 2015 Finalist - Foreword…
I am a professor of English and Visual Culture at St. John’s University in New York. My research in recent years has focused on reexamining the fate of modernist art in Hitler’s Germany. I have chosen five books that have shaped our understanding of Nazi art and have new resonance with the present resurgence of fascism and authoritarian governments around the world.
This is one of the most influential studies of cultural politics in Nazi Germany which takes as its focus the bureaucracy Joseph Goebbels charged with integrating pre-National Socialist artists and their organizations into the new cultural and political order. Noteworthy, of course, throughout Steinweis’s masterpiece of institutional reconstruction, is the revelation that National Socialist aesthetic preferences were not novel but represented the appropriation of the prevailing conservative taste dominant in the late Weimar Republic.
From 1933 to 1945, the Reich Chamber of Culture exercised a profound influence over hundreds of thousands of German artists and entertainers. Alan Steinweis focuses on the fields of music, theatre and the visual arts in this study of Nazi cultural administration, examining a complex pattern of interaction among leading Nazi figures, German cultural functionaries, ordinary artists, and consumers of culture. Steinweis gives special attention to Nazi efforts to purge the arts of Jews and other so-called undesirables.
I have been studying this period of German history for more than 40 years and teaching it at Manchester since 1991. I have no family connections to Germany, but I went on a school exchange to Hannover when I was 14 and became fascinated by the country and its history. I chose to do my PhD on this period because it seemed less researched than the Weimar and Nazi eras which followed. Contesting the German Empirewas an attempt to show how historians’ views of Imperial Germany have changed over time, and to give a flavor of their arguments. Reading it will save you from having to digest 500 books yourself!
Essay collections are usually rather variable in quality, but this volume on the multiple ways in which modernity was staged, debated, and contested in Germany between the 1890s and the 1930s, is consistently good. The individual essays are all rich in interesting detail, yet it is the collectively written introduction that is likely to find the widest readership, offering not only a succinct summary of ways in which global discussions about the concept of modernity can help us to understand the course of German history, but also some pointers on how the German case can contribute to global historical discussion.
What was German modernity? What did the years between 1880 and 1930 mean for Germany's navigation through a period of global capitalism, imperial expansion, and technological transformation?
German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar brings together leading historians of the Imperial and Weimar periods from across North America to readdress the question of German modernities. Acutely attentive to Germany's eventual turn towards National Socialism and the related historiographical arguments about 'modernity', this volume explores the variety of social, intellectual, political, and imperial projects pursued by those living in Germany in the Wilhelmine and Weimar years who were yet uncertain about what…
The American-born son of Jewish refugees, I would have every reason to revile the erstwhile capital of The Third Reich. But ever since my first visit, as a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, Berlin, a city painfully honest about its past, captured my imagination. A bilingual, English-German author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, travel memoir, and translations from the German, Ghost Dance in Berlin charts my take as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in a villa on Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, an experience marked by memorable encounters with derelicts, lawyers, a taxi driver, a hooker, et al, and with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.
Kurt Tucholsky’s books were among the first to be banned and burned by the Nazis. And with good reason. A Jewish journalist of a left-leaning bent with a tart tongue and an acid wit, Tucholsky, who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with his typewriter," as per his contemporary, Erich Kästner, represented everything the Nazis sought to eradicate. Tucholsky tapped the anarchic spirit of 1920s Berlin just as painter Georg Grosz captured its bloated, pock-marked face. Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches from the Weimar Republic contain a representative sampling of Tucholsky’s pithiest texts. A forerunner of flash fiction, his concise writing style, and tongue-in-cheek tone are harbingers of new journalism and among the many influences on my own writing.
Berlin! Berlin! is a satirical selection from the man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy, who was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as Georg Grosz was its face. It shines a light on the Weimar Republic and the post-World WarI struggle, which fore¬shadowed the Third Reich. Kurt Tucholsky was a brilliant satirist, poet, storyteller, lyricist, pacifist, and Democrat; a fighter, lady's man, reporter, and early warner against the Nazis who hated and loathed him and drove him out of his country. He was a "small, fat Berliner," who "wanted to stop a catastrophe with…
I’m President of the Writers Guild Initiative, with a mission of giving a voice to populations not being heard (LGBT asylum seekers, exonerated death row prisoners, Dreamers, etc.). In our writing workshops I see how marginalized communities are deprived of their rights and how insidiously minority rule is seizing power. Fascism depends on demonizing the Other, which was weaponized during the Trump years and is exploding on the right. This issue animates my life and work as a writer, mentor, speaker, and teacher. In the USA, democracy is hanging by a thread. My book takes a deep dive into what this means for an American family over the next fifteen years.
Jason Lutes spent decades creating this masterpiece—a graphic novel that brilliantly reconstructs life in Berlin in the years before Hitler became Chancellor. The characters are fully dimensional, a diverse and compelling collection of individuals, reeling from World War I, struggling to face the fall of Weimar and the cold hands of fascism tightening around their necks. This is a perfect melding of art, narrative, and political urgency that speaks eloquently to our perilous age.
Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the comics medium. For twenty years, Jason Lutes toiled on this intimate, sweeping epic before the collected Berlin was published in 2018 to widespread acclaim, including rave reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Vulture, Washington Post, and many other outlets. Lutes s historical fiction about the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism is seen through the eyes of the Jews and the Nazis; the socialists and the socialites; the lavishly decorated queer clubs and the crumbling tenement apartments. Marthe Muller is an aspiring artist…
While growing up in a Vermont town in the lower Champlain Valley, I became fascinated with the wealth of nearby historic sites dating from the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Within easy reach of our family station wagon were Fort Ticonderoga and more. I became especially intrigued by German mercenaries hired by the British to fight the American colonists. My interest led me to become a history major at the University of Vermont, and eventually to Germany as a correspondent for The Associated Press. I worked and lived in Germany from 1987-1997, covering the toppling of Communism, the birth of a new Germany, the rise of neo-Nazi violence, and other themes.
Alfred Döblin, one of the most consequential German authors of all time, is best known for his gritty, modernist Weimar-era novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Often overlooked are two works of historical fiction by Döblin, A People Betrayed,and Karl and Rosa. Set in Berlin during the November 1918 proletarian revolution, these two books are epic in scope, employing both real and fictional characters to tell of the violent beginnings of the Weimar era, a foreshadowing of the political and social fissures that would plague Germany’s first postwar democracy and ultimately set the stage for Hitler’s rise to power.
November 1918. The First World War is over, the battle is lost a and everywhere there is talk of revolution. Leaders of the German military have formed an uneasy alliance with the socialists who control the government and have proclaimed a new German republic, but throughout Berlin rival groups stage rallies and organize strikes. In A People Betrayed, the first volume of the epic November 1918: A German Revolution, Alfred Doblin takes us into the public and private dramas of these turbulent days, introducing us to a remarkable cast of fictional and historical characters, and bringing them to life in…
As a not well-known writer of science fiction, that grew up reading speculative fiction novels by not very well-known authors, I want to shine a light on the more obscure corners of my bookshelf. Neil Gaiman and Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Jordan get plenty of press. They don’t need any help. This is a list of authors that I don’t think enough people are talking about. And it’s a shame, because all of them have a lot of really interesting worlds to explore. Enjoy.
I’m a huge Philip K. Dick fan. I read an article where PKD said that A.E. van Vogt was his favorite author, but I’d never even heard the name before. Then, everywhere I went for about a month – barbershops, thrift stores, coffee shops – there was an A.E. van Vogt book laying around. Which is something that would happen in a PKD novel, but more sinister. If you like the otherwordly, discombobulating feeling of reading Flow My Tears the Policeman Said or A Scanner Darkly, you’ll enjoy The World of Null-A.
Grandmaster A.E. Van Vogt was one of the giants of the Gold Age of classic SF, the 1940's. Of his masterpieces, THE WORLD OF NULL-A is most famous and most influential. It was the first major trade SF hardcover ever, published in 1949, and has been in print in various editions ever since. The careers of Philip K Dick, Keith Laumer, Alfred Bester, Charles Harness and Philip Jose Farmer were created or influenced by THE WORLD OF NULL-A. It is required reading for anyone who wishes to know the canon of SF classics.
My fields at the University of Notre Dame, where I teach and do research, are philosophy and literature, and I have often been attracted to broader questions. I found ugliness to be a topic of considerable fascination, also for students, and yet it has almost never been addressed. I wrote the book to discover for myself what ugliness is and what it has to do with beauty.
George Grosz was the first great artist I encountered whose works were both strikingly powerful and deeply ugly. Grosz portrayed the ugliness of the Germans during the period before Hitler’s ascent.
His works are intentionally disordered. Yet the combination of ugly content and dissonant form work together, such that on a higher level, form and content are in harmony.
Grosz painted intemperance, gluttony, lust, and unbridled power as the driving forces of society. He was a master at showing us the ugliness of the ugly. The book offers an excellent combination of images and text, with an appropriate focus on the Weimar years.
