Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Outcast A Jewish Girl In Wartime Berlin
Download Outcast A Jewish Girl In Wartime Berlin full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Outcast A Jewish Girl In Wartime Berlin ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin by : Inge Deutschkron
Download or read book Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin written by Inge Deutschkron and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1933, when she is ten, Berliner Inge Deutschkron learns that she is a Jew. At first her family is at greater risk for their leftist politics than because they are Jews. Her father flees to England; Inge and her mother hide in plain sight as non-Jews, dependent on the underground network for their survival, in constant danger of discovery or betrayal. Otto Weidt employed Inge in the office of his workshop for the blind. Toward the end of the war, Inge and her mother manage to leave Berlin, and eventually emigrate to England. Inge Deutschkron became an Israeli citizen and an editor of Maariv. “One of the greatest successes of German memoir literature” — Andreas Platthaus,Frankfurter Allgemeine “... invaluable as testimony of the war years of one of Berlin’s 12,000 surviving Jews.” — Kirkus Reviews “[A] simple and charming memoir by a Jewish woman of how she survived as a girl in her late teens in wartime Berlin... Unsentimental, resilient and aware that luck can make all the difference, Inge Deutschkron... has remained a true Berliner.” — István Deák, The New York Review of Books
Book Synopsis Sparing the Child by : Hamida Bosmajian
Download or read book Sparing the Child written by Hamida Bosmajian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bosmajian explores children's texts that have either a Holocaust survivor or a former member of the Hitler Youth as a protagonist.
Download or read book Paper Love written by Sarah Wildman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She was your grandfather's true love, was the only answer given when Sarah Wildman presented her grandmother with a dozen photographs of a dark-haired, smiling young woman she had stumbled upon in her grandfather's old office. 'True love'? It was stated as fact, and with no further information. Who was this woman? And what was her relationship to her grandfather? When pressed, her grandfather's sister offered a bit more- 'She was brilliant! And so in love with your grandfather.' It was tantalizing, but agonizingly open-ended. Growing up, Wildman could reel off the details of her grandfather Karl's escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna. He was the irresistibly charismatic center of her family, beloved by everyone he encountered. His flight from Vienna six months after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 was at the center of his myth- Karl was a success at everything. But no narrative is as simple as it initially appears. Years after her grandfather's death, Wildman found a cache of letters written to him, in a file labelled 'Correspondence, patients A-G.' What she discovered inside weren't dry medical histories; what was written instead opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family's prewar Vienna. One woman's letters stood out- these were mailed from the woman in the photos. Her name was Valerie Scheftel - Valy. She was Karl's lover, who had remained in Europe when he boarded a ship bound for the United States in Hamburg in September 1938. But why had she not left with Karl? And more important, what had happened to her? With the help of the letters Valy had written to her grandfather, Wildman started to piece together her story. The letters revealed a woman desperate to escape and still clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom. Obsessed with learning what happened to Valy, Wildman began a quest that lasted years and spanned continents. Along the way she discovered, to her shock, an entire world of other people searching for the same woman. In the course of unearthing Valy's ultimate fate, she was forced to re-examine the narrative of her grandfather's triumphant escape and how this history fit within her own life and her own generation, and in the process, she rescued a life seemingly lost to history. Praise for Paper Love 'Ignore anyone who tells you there is nothing more to be said about the Holocaust, and no new ways of telling the tragedy. Sarah Wildman's gripping, tender, beautifully painful book gets to the heart of the matter through matters of the heart. And along with the pathos and pain, there is profound and honest thoughtfulness too.' Simon Schama, author of The Story of the Jews 'In this captivating and elegantly written book, Sarah Wildman uses the story of a single fascinating but utterly normal woman to illuminate the tragedy of the millions murdered during the Holocaust. Though the themes are universal - family, memory, myth - what makes this remarkable book shine is the way Wildman brings to life a person lost to history, making us care desperately both for her and for her vanished world.' Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure 'In spellbinding prose, Sarah Wildman traces her quest to understand what happened to her grandfather's mysterious lover, whom he had to leave behind when he fled Vienna in 1938. Revealing deeper truths about history and the tricky nature of memory, Paper Loveis a breathtakingly powerful and beautiful new book.' David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z 'Sarah Wildman is a member of the last generation of young Jews who grew up in families presided over by Holocaust survivors and their stories -
Book Synopsis When Angels Fooled the World: Rescuers of Jews in Wartime Hungary by : Charles Fenyvesi
Download or read book When Angels Fooled the World: Rescuers of Jews in Wartime Hungary written by Charles Fenyvesi and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2024-04-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a beautiful book in many ways. Beautiful not only for its writing but also for its portrayal of decent, heroic gentiles during the Holocaust. I defy anyone reading this account of angels under the German occupation not to shed tears by the end of the book — beneficent tears of hope, joy and gratitude. When Angels Fooled the World tells of five individuals: Raoul Wallenberg, a Lutheran pastor, a janitor, a woman who worked in a municipal birth registry, and a journalist who happened to be the author’s uncle by marriage. All dared to go against the prevailing Nazi German policy and saved Jews from deportation and death... a unique blend of passionate engagement and clear, level-headed analysis of the crucial months in 1944 when the Germans and their Hungarian Arrow Cross supporters ruled the land. The book’s lambent prose, as well as its mixture of memoir and broad sweep of Hungarian-Jewish ambience and history, enhance its fascination and appeal.” — Sun Sentinel “This captivating writing by a noted Hungarian-American author and journal editor, himself a Holocaust survivor, focuses on Hungary during the Holocaust period and the outstanding courage of a group of Righteous Gentiles (viewed as “angels” of salvation) including, among others, the well-known Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews with exit passports; a civil servant woman who provided Jews with certificates that they were Christians; and a Lutheran priest who saved Jewish children in a Christian orphanage. The book is based on historical facts, anecdotes, interviews, and the author’s family experiences and tribulations. Family photos and a relevant bibliography enhance this interesting volume.” — Multicultural Review
Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin by : Andrew J. Webber
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin written by Andrew J. Webber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by international specialists in the literature of Berlin provides a lively and stimulating account of writing in and about the city in the modern period. The first eight chapters chart key chronological developments from 1750 to the present day, while subsequent chapters focus on Berlin drama and poetry in the twentieth century and explore a set of key identity questions: ethnicity/migration, gender (writing by women), and sexuality (queer writing). Each chapter provides an informative overview along with closer readings of exemplary texts. The volume is designed to be accessible for readers seeking an introduction to the literature of Berlin, while also providing new perspectives for those already familiar with the topic. With a particular focus on the turbulent twentieth century, the account of Berlin's literary production is set against broader cultural and political developments in one of the most fascinating of global cities.
Book Synopsis Germans Against Germans by : Moshe Zimmermann
Download or read book Germans Against Germans written by Moshe Zimmermann and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the many narratives about the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust, the story about the Jews who lived in the eye of the storm—the German Jews—has received little attention. Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, tells this story—how Germans declared war against other Germans, that is, against German Jews. Author Moshe Zimmermann explores questions of what made such a war possible? How could such a radical process of exclusion take place in a highly civilized, modern society? What were the societal mechanisms that paved the way for legal discrimination, isolation, deportation, and eventual extermination of the individuals who were previously part and parcel of German society? Germans against Germans demonstrates how the combination of antisemitism, racism, bureaucracy, cynicism, and imposed collaboration culminated in "the final solution."
Download or read book Berlin written by David Clay Large and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-10-15 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the political history of the past century, no city has played a more prominent-though often disastrous-role than Berlin. At the same time, Berlin has also been a dynamic center of artistic and intellectual innovation. If Paris was the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Berlin was to become the signature city for the next hundred years. Once a symbol of modernity, in the Thirties it became associated with injustice and the abuse of power. After 1945, it became the iconic City of the Cold War. Since the fall of the Wall, Berlin has again come to represent humanity's aspirations for a new beginning, tempered by caution deriving from the traumas of the recent past. David Clay Large's definitive history of Berlin is framed by the two German unifications of 1871 and 1990. Between these two events several themes run like a thread through the city's history: a persistent inferiority complex; a distrust among many ordinary Germans, and the national leadership of the "unloved city's" electric atmosphere, fast tempo, and tradition of unruliness; its status as a magnet for immigrants, artists, intellectuals, and the young; the opening up of social, economic, and ethnic divisions as sharp as the one created by the Wall.
Book Synopsis Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews by : Leonard Baker
Download or read book Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews written by Leonard Baker and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2020-07-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Days of Sorrow and Pain, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, tells the story of Germany’s Jews under the Nazis and of one man’s valiant efforts to help them meet the horrors of the Hitler regime. Leonard Baker explores the disintegration of German society, the plight of German Jews and the philosophy of Leo Baeck which enabled him to guide his people in their struggle for survival. After Hitler came to power, German Jews formed the Reichsvertretung with Leo Baeck at its head. As Berlin’s leading Rabbi and one of the foremost Jewish theologians in the world, Baeck was the rallying point for all Jewish factions. He dealt secretly with emissaries from abroad to arrange for Jews to emigrate and saw to it that Jewish children received a religious education. Young men were trained for the rabbinate in Berlin as late as 1942. Leo Baeck chose to remain in Germany as long as there were still Jews there. He was arrested five times, once after writing a prayer to be read in all German synagogues reminding Jews that even “in this day of sorrow and pain,” they bowed only before God and never before man. After his last arrest in 1943 at the age of 69, Rabbi Baeck was sent to Theresienstadt where he hauled trash carts by day, and organized educational programs for his fellow inmates at night, consoling them, becoming one of their strengths. After the war, having survived the Holocaust, Baeck never sought revenge, but worked for reconciliation between Germans and Jews. He became a world leader of liberal Judaism and never doubted the ultimate triumph of good over evil nor underestimated the responsibility of the individual to bring about that triumph. “Only now, more than twenty years after Baeck’s death, has Leonard Baker, a writer on American political history, given us a full life story. Drawing on nearly a hundred interviews with persons who knew Baeck and supplementing these with a rich variety of printed and archival sources, he has succeeded in fashioning an intriguing portrait of the rabbi-scholar called upon to assume leadership in a time of crisis. The inherent drama of the subject together with Baker’s practiced writing skill has made for a book of broad popular interest. It has even been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography.” — Michael A. Meyer, American Jewish History “There are several outstanding reasons why this book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography. The evidence of extensive research and scholarship exists in one of the most complete oral and written bibliographies that is presently available on contemporary German Jewry. Baker’s writing style, journalistic at times, is free from conventional pedantry, but is satisfying enough for even the most stodgy academe. Furthermore, the historical flow of the text leaves little doubt that this is one serious author... Rabbi Baeck is shown as both the German as a Jew and the Jew as a German. Writing with an obvious appreciation for the role of the Jews in modern German history, Baker explains Baeck in the context of Reform Judaism...” — Michael W. Rubinoff, German Studies Review “Baker has written a marvelous account of Baeck’s long and remarkable life.” — Lew’s Author Blog “Baker tells Baeck’s story in relation to the history of the German Jews down to his death as an expatriate in England in the 1950s... Baker’s narrative is scholarly and simple in tone, as it should be; and although chiefly a study in Jewish history, it is also a study in historical tragedy and moral will...” — Kirkus Reviews
Book Synopsis Flight and Concealment by : Susanna Schrafstetter
Download or read book Flight and Concealment written by Susanna Schrafstetter and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between ten thousand and twelve thousand Jews tried to escape Nazi genocide by going into hiding. With the help of Jewish and non-Jewish relatives, friends, or people completely unknown to them, these "U-boats," as they came to be known, dared to lead a life underground. Flight and Concealment brings to light their hidden stories. Deftly weaving together personal accounts with a broader comparative look at the experiences of Jews throughout Germany, historian Susanna Schrafstetter tells the story of the Jews in Munich and Upper Bavaria who fled deportation by going underground. Archival sources and interviews with survivors and with the Germans who aided or exploited them reveal a complex, often intimate story of hope, greed, and sometimes betrayal. Flight and Concealment shows the options and strategies for survival of those in hiding and their helpers, and discusses the ways in which some Germans enriched themselves at the expense of the refugees.
Book Synopsis The Companion Guide to Berlin by : Brian Ladd
Download or read book The Companion Guide to Berlin written by Brian Ladd and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2004 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berlin's traumatic past and vibrant present explored and explained in a guide to the culture, buildings and society of the city. Most people do not think of Berlin as a beautiful city, but it is filled with stunning sights, sounds and textures, all the more astonishing when the stories behind them are revealed. Today's Berlin is new and vibrant, but historyhas left its scars. A look in the right place is rewarded with glimpses of the glories of old Prussia as well as the abominations of Hitler's Third Reich and of the outer bulwark of the Soviet empire. Brian Ladd, a historian whohas been returning to Berlin for twenty-five years, pays homage to the familiar landmarks, but he also penetrates into obscure corners of the city and brings them alive with his shrewd and informed comment. He explains what the sights of Berlin have meant to Berliners who coped under kings and dictators, and who toiled, suffered and celebrated as their city was destroyed and rebuilt. This book invites you to share their passions as it draws you into the dynamic new capital that has risen from wreckage of post-war German history. BRIAN LADD is at the State University of New York at Albany. He has been a constant visitor to Berlin over a quarter of a century.
Book Synopsis Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto by : Ernest Heppner
Download or read book Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto written by Ernest Heppner and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Nazis took power, Heppner, a member of a privileged middle-class German Jewish family, suffered from constant anti-Semitism. But Kristallnacht, in November 1938, introduced a new level of Nazi horror: Heppner and his mother used the family’s resources to escape to Shanghai, the only city in the world that did not require a visa. Heppner was taken aback by experiences on the ocean liner that took him and other refugees to Shanghai: he was embarrassed and confounded when Egyptian Jews offered worn clothing to the Jewish passengers, he resented the edicts against Jewish passengers disembarking in any ports on the way, and he was unprepared for the poverty and cultural dislocation of the great city of Shanghai. But being self-reliant, energetic, and clever, Heppner found niches for his skills that enabled him to survive in a precarious fashion in Shanghai’s ghetto. In 1945, after the liberation of China, Heppner found a responsible position with the American forces in Nanjing. He and his wife, a fellow refugee he had met and married in Shanghai, arrived in the United States in 1947 with only eleven dollars but boundless hope and energy. “This inspiring memoir is a story of survival... The unique and traumatic experiences of tens of thousands of Jews who managed to escape for the ‘temporary’ haven of Shanghai are described with objectivity and clarity.” — Leonard H. D. Gordon, Shofar “The author describes in detail the sights and sounds of his adopted environment, the mingling of Jews and many nationalities, the choking stench and the humidity, the decadent, exotic underworld of criminals and beggars, the terror of air raids and Japanese guards, the rampant poverty and disease. The general tone, however, is positive, even inspiring, and behind all the experiences lurks a sense of adventure and simple good luck.” — Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter “A fascinating and moving memoir that begins with [Heppner’s] childhood in Nazi Germany and moves briskly from one compelling scene to the next.” — Forward “Ernest G. Heppner’s Shanghai Refuge fills in the fragments... of this little-known Jewish community... His story is an odd mixture of defiance, courage, endurance and survival. His experience [is] fascinating.” — Michael Berenbaum, Director, U.S. Holocaust Research Institute “An important addition to the historical record of World War II, an autobiography of a remarkable man’s formative years, and a testimony to the power of community and human perseverance.” — Indianapolis Star “Heppner’s descriptions... ring true and carry conviction, especially when he recalls in evocative detail his day-to-day experiences in Nazi Germany. Similarly, his recollection of Shanghai, with its small, telling details of privations, indignities, anxieties, and horrors make maximum impact—from the rat in the bakery that he lifted up by its tail to the carnage following an American air raid.” — Bernard Wasserstein, author ofThe Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln
Book Synopsis Survival in the Shadows by : Barbara Lovenheim
Download or read book Survival in the Shadows written by Barbara Lovenheim and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National bestseller: This “harrowing” true story of two Jewish families who survived hiding in the heart of the Nazi capital “honors the human spirit” (Andrea Dworkin). In January 1943, unable to flee Germany, the four members of the Arndt family went underground to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Ellen Lewinsky and her mother, Charlotte, joined them; a year later, Bruno Gumpel arrived. Hiding in a small factory near Hitler’s bunker, without identification cards or food-ration stamps, they were dependent on German strangers for survival. When Russian soldiers finally rescued the group in April 1945, the families were near death from starvation. But their will to live triumphed and two months later, four of the survivors—Erich Arndt and Ellen Lewinsky, and Ruth Arndt and Bruno Gumpel—reunited in a double wedding ceremony. Survival in the Shadows chronicles the previously untold story of the largest group of German Jews to have survived hiding in Berlin through the final and most deadly years of the Holocaust. Relayed to Barbara Lovenheim by three survivors from the group, the riveting story is a touching portrayal of the bravery of these seven Jews, and a heartfelt acknowledgment of the fortitude and humanity of the compassionate Germans who kept them alive.
Download or read book Berlin written by Joseph Pearson and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Joseph Pearson poetically puts it in this rich look at one of Europe’s most fascinating cities: Berlin is a party in a graveyard. Europe’s youth capital, Berlin is also beset by sustained guilt for the atrocities that were ordered by its Nazi officers during the Third Reich. Built and rebuilt on the ruins of multiple regimes, Berlin in the twenty-first-century houses an extraordinary diversity of refugees, immigrants, and expats. Offering a comprehensive but concise history, Pearson tells the story of Berlin’s past over nine centuries while also painting a portrait of the vibrant German capital today. Pearson describes the rise of Berlin from a small settlement surrounded by bog to one of the crucial economic and political centers of Europe. Berlin is a palimpsest of a cutting edge and dynamic modern culture over a troubled history, one that is visible in bombsites, museums, late-night clubs, and even a lake that allegedly hosts a man-eating monster. He ultimately shows how the city is imbued with an array of unnerving elements: emptiness, provincialism, ramshackle industrial eclecticism, lurid and lascivious counter-cultural expressions, and a tremendous history of violence—but also that these are precisely the sorts of things that give the city its unique charge. Posing one thought-provoking question after another, Pearson walks the city’s neighborhoods, peeling back layer upon layer of history in order to reveal a Berlin that few of us know.
Book Synopsis Between Dignity and Despair by : Marion A. Kaplan
Download or read book Between Dignity and Despair written by Marion A. Kaplan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-10 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Book Synopsis A Companion to the Holocaust by : Simone Gigliotti
Download or read book A Companion to the Holocaust written by Simone Gigliotti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship. A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact. Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies: Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.
Book Synopsis Historical Dictionary of Berlin by : Ulrike Zitzlsperger
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Berlin written by Ulrike Zitzlsperger and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II Berlin became one of the playgrounds of the Cold War; the Berlin Wall made the division between East and West, between ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ in 1961 highly visible, though it did remove Berlin from front-line politics. East and West Berlin had turned into shop-windows of ideologies – West Berlin representing the lure of a market economy, East Berlin the promise of socialism. It is, then, fitting that the fall of the Wall in 1989 awarded Berlin such a prominent role. It was here that the development after Reunification of East and West became a closely observed event – and, well beyond Germany, Berlin appeared to represent fundamental developments throughout Europe at the time. Today, Berlin is the capital of reunified Germany and therefore one of the key political players in the European Union (EU) and it’s now a desirable destination for young entrepreneurs. The Historical Dictionary of Berlin contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, places, institutions, and events. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Berlin.
Book Synopsis Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by : Sinclair McKay
Download or read book Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World written by Sinclair McKay and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond. Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity—in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He traces the city’s history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945. It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins. Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work—a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the ordinary citizens from 1919 forward should be given more prominence. That the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying—and for some, initially exhilarating—transformation should be heard. Today, the exciting, youthful Berlin we see is patterned with echoes that lean back into that terrible vortex. In this new history of Berlin, Sinclair McKay erases the lines between the generations of Berliners, making their voices heard again to create a compelling, living portrait of life in this city that lay at the center of the world.
