Year Zero

Year Zero
Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0143125974

A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

Year Zero: Berlin 1945

Year Zero: Berlin 1945
Author: David McCormack
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2019-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0244092095

Year Zero vividly describes the apocalyptic downfall of the Nazi state in Berlin and the subsequent quadripartite occupation of the shattered capital by the Allied powers. This is a powerful story of victims, bystanders, persecutors, opportunists, heroes and villains. Meticulously researched and rich in historical detail, Year Zero draws on searing eyewitness accounts and archive material to provide a gripping narrative of the Wagnerian climax in Hitler's capital and the dramatic political, social, cultural and economic changes which occurred in the city during its first year under occupation. The author David McCormack works as a battlefield guide and historian. Previous publications include As the Cherry Blossom Falls: Japan at War 1931-45 and The Berlin Battlefield Guide: Part 1 ? The Battle of the Oder-Neisse.

1945, Year Zero

1945, Year Zero
Author: John Lukacs
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1978
Genre: History
ISBN:

Regeringschefer, præsidenter; Krigsafslutning 1945

After Year Zero

After Year Zero
Author: Annett Busch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Decolonization in art
ISBN: 9788364177255

The project (ie the exhibition and the publication) "After Year Zero" takes as its starting point the realignment of global relationships after the Second World War Europe s hour zero. However, it does not recount the post-1945 confrontation of the ideological blocs of the Cold War, and rather focuses on the world-historical caesura of decolonization. This investigation does not revolve around the confrontation, or the separation of identities, between the global North and South, but around models and geographies of collaboration, and reflection on the processes by which the universal is generated. By highlighting particular historical developments, it takes into account the fundamental interconnection of European and African history along with their respective narratives. To design and build new narratives of these historic events, to re-discover unpredictable and forgotten connections and alliances magazines, journals and newspapers will serve as a main source but also as a topic for the divers essays, written by researchers, authors, artists, curators, critics, architects and scientists. Where no art history exists, critical journals and other related platforms are crucial to molding its discourse and involve all the intellectual processes that such an undertaking implies. This first sentence of the mission statement of "NKA - Journal of Contemporary African Art," which was co-founded in 1994 by Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of Documenta 11 and head of the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, crystallises the main concern of many magazines launched at various times and different places within the African continent or the African diaspora. The format of magazines is not so much understood as a business model but rather as a periodical and often temporary intervention against a hegemonic voice. These were often set up under precarious circumstances as a collaborative artistic form of organizing discourse, critique and self-expression, but also as a format which renders possible the necessary task of creating a new language to talk about art, life and politics. The publication "After Year Zero "is not only a collection of new text-essays which accompanies the correspondent exhibition (at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2013 and at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2015) but contains also eight different visual-essays around different emphases which are designed like a collage of documents, quotes, images, short contextual texts serving as the apparent surface of the historic narrative. Another relevant part of the book span the works by more than twenty artists present in the exhibition. "

Japan 1945

Japan 1945
Author: Joe O'Donnell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

"In addition to the official photographs he turned over to his superiors, O'Donnell recorded some three hundred images for himself, but following his discharge from the Marines he could not bear to look at them. He put the negatives in a trunk that remained unopened until 1989, when he finally felt compelled to confront once more what he had seen through his lens during his seven months in post-war Japan." "Exhibited in Europe and Japan during the 1990s, O'Donnell's photographs were first published in book form in a 1995 Japanese edition. This edition, the first to appear in the United States, includes an additional twenty photographs and will bring O'Donnell's eloquent testament to the horrors of war to an even wider audience."--BOOK JACKET.

Countdown 1945

Countdown 1945
Author: Chris Wallace
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1982143355

A "behind-the-scenes account of the 116 days leading up to the Americans attack on Hiroshima"--Dust jacket flap.

The World Since 1945

The World Since 1945
Author: P. M. H. Bell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2016-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472534425

A masterly synthesis of the history of the contemporary world, The World Since 1945 offers the ideal introduction to the events of the period between the end of the Second World War and the present day. P. M. H. Bell and Mark Gilbert balance a clear narrative with in-depth analysis to guide the reader through the aftermath of the Second World War, the Cold War, decolonization, Détente and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, up to the on-going ethnic strife and political instability of the 21st century. The new edition has been thoroughly revised to fully reflect developments in the history and historiography of the post-war world, and features five new chapters on the post-Cold War world, covering topics including: - The rise and fall of American hegemony - The decline of Europe - The rise of Asia - Political Islam as a global force - The role of human rights The World Since 1945 challenges us to better understand what happened and why in the post-war period and shows the ways in which the past continues to exercise a profound influence on the present. It is essential reading for any student of contemporary history.

Germany 1945

Germany 1945
Author: Richard Bessel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 648
Release: 2012-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1849832013

In 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen. Germany 1945 examines the country's emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; survivors had lost their families; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses. Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on a transition to relative peace. Germany's return to humanity and prosperity is the hinge on which Europe's twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.

The Wages of Guilt

The Wages of Guilt
Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1590178599

In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II—a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous war crimes. As he travels through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, he encounters people who are remarkably honest in confronting the past and others who astonish by their evasions of responsibility, some who wish to forget the past and others who wish to use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism. Buruma explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries’ very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art have been shaped by its shadow. Today, seventy years after the end of the war, he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago. Sensitive yet unsparing, complex and unsettling, this is a profound study of how people face up to or deny terrible legacies of guilt and shame.

Hell to Pay

Hell to Pay
Author: D. M. Giangreco
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2017-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1682471667

Two years before the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped bring a quick end to hostilities in the summer of 1945, U.S. planners began work on Operation Downfall, codename for the Allied invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, in the Japanese home islands. While other books have examined Operation Downfall, D. M. Giangreco offers the most complete and exhaustively researched consideration of the plans and their implications. He explores related issues of the first operational use of the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, including the controversy surrounding estimates of potential U.S. casualties. Following years of intense research at numerous archives, Giangreco now paints a convincing and horrific picture of the veritable hell that awaited invader and defender. In the process, he demolishes the myths that Japan was trying to surrender during the summer of 1945 and that U.S. officials later wildly exaggerated casualty figures to justify using the atomic bombs to influence the Soviet Union. As Giangreco writes, “Both sides were rushing headlong toward a disastrous confrontation in the Home Islands in which poison gas and atomic weapons were to be employed as MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, succinctly put it, ‘a hard and bitter struggle with no quarter asked or given.’ Hell to Pay examines the invasion of Japan in light of the large body of Japanese and American operational and tactical planning documents the author unearthed in familiar and obscure archives. It includes postwar interrogations and reports that senior Japanese commanders and their staffs were ordered to produce for General MacArthur’s headquarters. This groundbreaking history counters the revisionist interpretations questioning the rationale for the use of the atomic bomb and shows that President Truman’s decision was based on real estimates of the enormous human cost of a conventional invasion. This revised edition of Hell to Pay expands on several areas covered in the previous book and deals with three new topics: U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the war against Imperial Japan; U.S., Soviet, and Japanese plans for the invasion and defense of the northernmost Home Island of Hokkaido; and Operation Blacklist, the three-phase insertion of American occupation forces into Japan. It also contains additional text, relevant archival material, supplemental photos, and new maps, making this the definitive edition of an important historical work.