Fans pick 100 books like Black Roses

One of the best explanations I’ve read of the rise of Fascism in Hitler’s Germany. I agree that ignoring the lessons of history means we’ll be forced to endure repetition. And Kerr paints such a chilling scenario no one in their right mind would wish the maxim to come true. His prose applies color and form like an artist at the top of their game.

At times I found him reminiscent of Chandler in the way he portrays the Nazis as the worst gangsters in the game. This is the first book of the Bernard Gunther series, and I was so enthralled that I raced through the others in just a few days. His storyline is filled with horror, passion, fear, and pathos—a tour de force of emotions.

One of Rory Clements’ many writing skills is the ability to create tension and explore an angle of an historical event.

It’s London 1936, and the king is about to abdicate. A woman is murdered in Berlin, and a fascist-leaning couple in Britain are killed. I liked how Clements joins these seemingly separate tragedies into a memorable story. I liked his hero, an academic drawn into the world of spying, Professor Tom Wilde.

I think a great novel's elements are believable characters, forensic attention to detail, and terrific tension, and they are all here.

As I read this riveting account, I felt like I was watching the events leading to the Munich Agreement of 1938. We all know the result of the agreement, but this book is much more than a historical account of what happened.

Harris tells the story through two friends who met at Oxford University in the 1920s. Now, one is an aide to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and the other a senior German Foreign Office official. They join forces to try to stop Chamberlain from signing the agreement.

I was impressed with the skillful way Harris revealed the story, which the exemplary writing is matched in detail and tension. 

Hitler’s rise to power was not inevitable. That’s the key point of this excellent, detailed account of the days leading to President Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany.

I liked Ashby Turner’s novel-like writing style and his high standard of scholarship. He writes about the wheeling and dealing, the tension of the history-changing event, and the internal conflicts of some of the key actors.

It’s one of the best nonfiction books about the Weimar period I have read.

This is the best book dealing with Hitler’s relationship with women in general—as well as several women in particular who were obsessed with him and vice-versa. One thing I noticed sociologically was the number of women who committed suicide after having an affair or a relationship with Hitler; even his own suicide included the suicide of Eva Braun as well as Magda Goebbels and her six children.

In fact, in my essay Holocaust Suicides, in my book, I discuss the idea that Nazism was a culture based on self-destruction and suicide. There was no other alternative except Armageddon and Gotterdammerung, the "twilight of the Gods" marked by world-altering destruction, extreme chaos, and out-and-out violence.

Hitler would die bringing down all of Germany (and the world if he could) at the same time. The Nazi women who committed suicide included Geli Raubal (more on her in the next book),… show more.

Peter Gay was a child in Nazi Berlin in the 1930s. I read his book to see what life was like there while writing my third novel, much of which takes place in Nazi Berlin. Gay was an academic historian but this memoir is deeply personal, laced with self-deprecating humour. His assimilated life (he and his father were staunch atheists) was relatively unaffected by the regime until 1933 when he became a Jew overnight by law. The Nazis quickly stripped the Jews of all rights, culminating in the violent Kristallnacht in 1938. He and his parents managed to escape to the U.S. six months later. Many of his relatives were killed. The underlying question in the book: why didn’t his family—and by extension other Jewish families—leave right after 1933 when Nazi plans became clear?

This idiosyncratic biography of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a 19th-century German-Jewish Berlin literary salon hostess may at first seem esoteric to the general reader. A prickly, contradictory character, Arendt’s portrayal of Rahel’s outsider status as a Jew in a largely hostile Christian society, her proto-feminist self-affirmation of her womanhood at a time when women were essentially groomed for marriage, and her paradoxical mix of intellectual self-assurance and crippling emotional insecurities make for a riveting read. You don’t have to be Jewish or a woman to appreciate the complexities of this prototypical Berliner.

If you are Jewish and have ambivalent feelings about visiting Berlin, then this could be the book for you.  Leonard Barkan is a professor at Princeton where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. A Jewish American, growing up in a secular New York family, his book is a personal reflection on traveling in the city. 

Berlin for Jews is part history and part travel guide.  Barkan shows how, in the early nineteenth century, Jews dominated the arts, sciences, and public life and the way in which, despite the horrors of the Nazi era, they left an indelible imprint on the Berlin of today.  The book, described as a “love letter” to the city, takes the reader through some of the most iconic locations of Jewish life and describes the long-lost elegant Jewish suburbs, salons, writers, artists, politicians, philanthropists, art collectors, and intellectuals. And throughout, Barkan muses on what… show more.

There are many books about the glitz and the cultural icons that we associate with Weimar Berlin. This one gives us a broader and deeper picture. Instead of concentrating on a few writers and artists, it anchors the city’s creative explosion in mass-market newspapers and their readers, turning our eyes to people in the streetcars and cafés and the stories they read about their own lives. We can read about sensational crimes just as Berliners did, and we find the prototypes of modern art in the layout and content of newspapers and in the chaos of the streets where they are hawked.

This is another book that manages to paint a picture of what life was like in Berlin during the war.  Roger Moorhouse tells some fascinating stories, such as that of Paul Ogorzow, the so-called S-Bahn Murderer. The fact that a serial killer was operating around Berlin’s railway system was a dilemma for the authorities who tried and failed to lay the blame on either Jews or Poles. Ogorzow was eventually captured convicted of the murder of eight women and of attacking thirty-seven more during 1940 and 1941. The fact he was a Nazi Party member was a deep embarrassment and didn’t help him: he was executed just days after his conviction.