When I Was a German, 1934-1945

When I Was a German, 1934-1945
Author: Christabel Bielenberg
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780803261518

This fascinating glimpse of Nazi Germany is provided by an Englishwoman who was fluent in German and at home in German society, yet not entirely of it. Christabel Bielenberg moved from passive to active resistance as Hitler seized power and the Nazi dictatorship clamped down.

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Author: Ana Menéndez
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1555847870

Eleven short stories of the Cuban immigrant experience as characters adjust to life in the United Sates, from an award-winning author. From the prize–winning title story—a masterpiece of humor and heartbreak—unfolds a collection of tales that illuminate the landscape of an exiled community rich in heritage, memory, and longing for the past. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd is at once “tender and sharp-fanged” as Ana Menéndez evocatively charts the territory from Havana to Coral Gables, Florida, and explores whether any of us are capable, or even truly desirous, of outrunning our origins (LA Weekly). “With the grace of Margaret Atwood and the sensuality of Laura Esquivel,” Menéndez makes an unforgettable debut “rich in metaphor, wisdom, and delicious subtlety” (St. Petersburg Times).

Belonging

Belonging
Author: Nora Krug
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1476796637

* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).

They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free
Author: Milton Mayer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2017-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 022652597X

National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Brahms and the German Spirit

Brahms and the German Spirit
Author: Daniel Beller-McKenna
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2004-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674013186

Beller-McKenna counters music historians's reluctance to address Brahms's Germanness, wary perhaps of fascist implications. He gives an account of the intertwining of nationalism, politics, and religion that underlies major works, and enriches both our understanding of his art and German culture.

I Was a German - The Autobiography of Ernst Toller

I Was a German - The Autobiography of Ernst Toller
Author: Ernst Toller
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-11-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1447499239

This is the fascinating autobiography of Ernst Toller. Ernst Toller (1893 – 1939) was a German left-wing playwright, best known for his expressionist plays. He also famously served for six days in 1919 as the President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, later being imprisoned for his actions. This volume is highly recommended for those with an interest in twentieth-century European history. Contents include: “Childhood”, “A Student in France”, “War”, “At the Front”, “An Attempt to Forget Revolt”, “Strike”, “The Military Prison”, “The Lunatic Asylum”, “Revolution”, “The Bavarian Soviet Republic”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Germany and 'The West'

Germany and 'The West'
Author: Riccardo Bavaj
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2017-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785335049

“The West” is a central idea in German public discourse, yet historians know surprisingly little about the evolution of the concept. Contrary to common assumptions, this volume argues that the German concept of the West was not born in the twentieth century, but can be traced from a much earlier time. In the nineteenth century, “the West” became associated with notions of progress, liberty, civilization, and modernity. It signified the future through the opposition to antonyms such as “Russia” and “the East,” and was deployed as a tool for forging German identities. Examining the shifting meanings, political uses, and transnational circulations of the idea of “the West” sheds new light on German intellectual history from the post-Napoleonic era to the Cold War.

Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self

Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self
Author: Melita Maschmann
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 1965
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Account Rendered was first published in Germany in 1963 as Fazit: Kein Rechtfertigungsversuch or Account Rendered: No attempt at justification. Maschmann wrote to Hannah Arendt that her intent in writing this memoir was to help her former Nazi colleagues think about their actions, and to help others “better understand” why people like her had been drawn to Hitler. Written as a letter to an unnamed Jewish girl, this memoir details the trajectory of a socially-conscious, well-educated, middle-class girl as she joins the Hitler Youth, supervises the eviction of Polish farmers from their land and works in the high echelons of Nazi press and propaganda. Maschmann was arrested in 1945, at the age of 33, completed mandatory de-Nazification and became a freelance journalist. This eBook edition includes a new introduction explaining how the Publishers identified Maschmann’s high school Jewish friend, Marianne Schweitzer Burkenroad, born in 1918 and now living in California. In an afterword, she recounts for the first time her friendship with Maschmann and her reactions to Account Rendered. Listen here to a conversation about this eBook on WAMC. “[Account Rendered is an] important document of its time [...] I have the impression that you are totally sincere, otherwise I wouldn’t have written back to you.” — letterfrom Hannah Arendt to Melita Maschmann “[A] soul-searching record in which [Melita Maschmann] attempts to state and understand her guilt as a Nazi... her account here is intelligent and convincing.” —Kirkus Reviews “There weren’t a lot of books by former Nazis in the Sixties. I found in [Account Rendered] someone who had been overtaken by history, was struggling to make sense of what no longer made sense, and to understand why it had once done so. In other books, the Jews were an abstraction. For Maschmann, the Jews were neighbors and friends, which complicated the process of dehumanization that she participated in. The memoir seemed believable and honest in ways that other testimonies from the defeated did not.” — Arthur Samuelson, former Editor-in-Chief, Schocken Books “Melita Maschmann’s candid [book], sub-titled ‘No attempt at justification,’ is a valuable study of the political seduction of youthful zeal” — Der Spiegel

Daddy was a German Spy

Daddy was a German Spy
Author: Brian Edwards
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2008-09-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1742288979

This engaging memoir covers the first 25 years of Brian Edward's life in Northern Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. His father abandoned his wife and son in dramatic circumstances when Brian was still a baby. He grew up in 'lodgings', often cared for by landladies who were mad, bad or simply sad, while his mother was at work. In his early teens Brian desperately tried to track down his mysterious father but to no avail. Years later he discovered that he had at least one half-sister and that his father may well have been a German spy, a bigamist and a charming con-man who embezzled funds from numerous employers. While Brian's relationship with his parents and their extended families lies at the heart of this book, Daddy was a German Spy is also a funny, poignant and intriguing story about growing up in Northern Ireland.