Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Homecomings
This book focuses on one of the most visible and important consequences of total defeat in postwar Germany: the return to East and West Germany of the two million German soldiers and POWs who spent an extended period in Soviet captivity. These former prisoners made up a unique segment of German society. They were both soldiers in the war of racial annihilation on the Eastern front and then suffered extensive hardship and deprivation themselves as prisoners of war. The book examines the lingering consequences of the soldiers' return and explores returnees' own responses to a radically changed and divided homeland. Historian Frank Biess traces the origins of the postwar period to the last year...
Unmasking Hitler
Among the many studies on German National Socialism that have appeared in the last forty to fifty years, one aspect has seldom been treated in detail: the cultural representations of Adolf Hitler from the late 1920s to the present. This book focuses on the image of Hitler in literature, photography, historiography, film, philosophy, theatre, and comic books by major artists and scholars such as Ernst Ottwalt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Bertolt Brecht, John Hearfield, Leni Riefenstahl, Charles Chaplin, Theodor W. Adorno, Heiner Muller, and George Tabori.
Coping with the Nazi Past
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.
Lifelines of Our Society
A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives. Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their de...
Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy
Through the colorful world of Berlin's grand hotels, this book charts a new history of German liberalism and explores the changing relationships among big business, society, and politics. Behind imposing facades, managers and workers were often the picture of orderly and harmonious service, despite living in sometimes uncomfortable proximity. Then, during World War I, class tensions rose to the surface and failed to resolve in the following years. Doubting the ability of the Weimar Republic to contain these conflicts, a group of hotel owners, some of the most prominent Jewish industrialists and financiers in the country, chose to let Adolf Hitler use their hotel, the Kaiserhof, as his Berlin headquarters in 1932. From a splendid suite opposite the chancellery, Hitler and his henchmen engineered the assumption of power, the death of the Weimar Republic, and the ruin of their hosts, the Kaiserhof's owners: Jewish liberals now fleeing for their lives. Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy asks how this came about and explores the decision-making processes that produced such catastrophic consequences. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Hotel Modernisms
This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in th...
Inside Party Headquarters
Everyday life in the East German Socialist Unity Party revolved heavily around maintaining the “party line” in all areas of society, whether through direct authority or corruption. Spanning a long period of the GDR’s history, from 1946 through 1989, Rüdiger Bergien presents the first study that examines the complexities of the central party’s communist apparatus. He focuses on their role as ideological watchdogs, as they fostered an underbelly and “inner life” for their employees to integrate the party’s pillars throughout East German society. Inside Party Headquarters reviews not only the party’s modes power and state interaction, but also the processes of negotiation and disputation preceding formal Politburo decisions, advancing the available detail and discourse surrounding this formative and volatile stretch of German history.
After the Nazis
A wide-ranging, insightful history of culture in West Germany—from literature, film, and music to theater and the visual arts After World War II a mood of despair and impotence pervaded the arts in West Germany. The culture and institutions of the Third Reich were abruptly dismissed, yet there was no immediate return to the Weimar period’s progressive ideals. In this moment of cultural stasis, how could West Germany’s artists free themselves from their experiences of Nazism? Moving from 1945 to reunification, Michael H. Kater explores West German culture as it emerged from the darkness of the Third Reich. Examining periods of denial and complacency as well as attempts to reckon with the past, he shows how all postwar culture was touched by the vestiges of National Socialism. From the literature of Günter Grass to the happenings of Joseph Beuys and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s innovations in electronic music, Kater shows how it was only through the reinvigoration of the cultural scene that West Germany could contend with its past—and eventually allow democracy to reemerge.
Death in the Shape of a Young Girl
In the early 1970s, a number of West German left-wing activists took up arms, believing that revolution would lead to social change. This publication questions the separation of political violence from feminist politics and offers a new understanding of left-wing female terrorists' actions as feminist practices that challenged existing gender ideologies. The author draws on archival sources, unpublished letters, and interviews with former activists to paint an interdisciplinary picture of West Germany's most notorious political group, the Red Army Faction (der Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF)).
