Fatherland
By Robert Harris
Why this book?
The best thrillers to educate, illuminate, and escape into guilt-free
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Browse the best books on Nazi Germany as recommended by authors, experts, and creators. Along with notes on why they recommend those books.
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By Robert Harris
The best thrillers to educate, illuminate, and escape into guilt-free
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By Len Deighton
While technically a prequel to Deighton’s well-known Cold War Game, Set, Match trilogy, Winter can certainly be read as a standalone novel. As the subtitle indicates, this is a book about a family. But really, this is a novel about two brothers, Peter and Pauli. The evolution of their relationship over the course of nearly half a century, 1900-1945, is the foundation on which Deighton explores this tumultuous period of German history. From their innocent and carefree youth in the late Wilhelmine period, to the trauma of their military service during the First World War, through the rise and rule…
The best fiction books set during the Third Reich
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By Richard Grunberger
The Nazis developed a unique social structure of total compliance with fear and terror just out of sight. The work describes family life struggling with the ritual of Nazism from the privileged elite, the average German family seeking some normality to the open oppression of the Jews.
The best books on the rise and fall of the Third Reich
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By Marthe Cohn, Wendy Holden
Marthe Cohn played a major role in the final year of World War II, spying for the French troops in Germany. She grew up in Metz, France speaking flawless French and German, and became a spy when members of her family and friends were tortured and killed. Faced with death many times, she survived to be decorated by the French government and finally told the story to her children. She lived for many years in Palos Verdes, California, where I live. When I heard her speak, I couldn’t believe that a woman who never reached five feet could have done…
The best fiction and nonfiction books about spies
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By Alan E. Steinweis
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.
The best books on art and aesthetics in Nazi Germany
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By Jeffrey Herf
Another highly original study—of the confluence of politics, technology, and culture in Nazi Germany as a holdover from tendencies already present in the Weimar Republic. Herf’s striking and influential phrase, “reactionary modernism,” encapsulates the seeming paradox of a future-oriented and technologically advanced regime that nonetheless adopted a seemingly archaic symbolic vernacular.
The best books on art and aesthetics in Nazi Germany
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