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This book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of time. Acclaimed historian Christopher Clark draws on four key figures from German history—Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Prussia, Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Adolf Hitler—to look at history through a temporal lens and ask how historical actors and their regimes embody unique conceptions of time.

Sommer 1945: Nichts ist mehr, wie es war: In den vier Monaten von Mai bis September 1945 bricht die alte Welt zusammen, und eine neue tut sich auf ...

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords.

A work of the utmost importance--as authoritative as it is explosive--Hitler's Willing Executioners will fundamentally change our perception of the Holocaust and of Germany in the Nazi period. Goldhagen reaches conclusions that are both uncompromising and savage, rejecting as inadequate the conventional historical explanations for how an entire country could allow the Holocaust to happen, and gives the first detailed, broad-ranging account of the actual killers of the Jews.

After the WWII, Germans began a generation-long debate about the status that should be accorded Wehrmacht deserters. The topic would be debated between the two Germanies and engaged survivors and perpetrators, playwrights, and judges, those who had stayed in the ranks and those who had not. Was the Wehrmacht a coward, a victim, or a role model? The book's discussion of this postwar debate explains how and why Germany finally decided to overturn military court-martial verdicts from the Second World War fifty years after its conclusion.

Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror in the minds of those who know about this infamous all-women’s concentration camp. Particularly shocking was the discovery that sometimes-lethal medical experiments were performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80% of them were political prisoners. Among them was a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance.

An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.

This is the forgotten tale of MI6's top spy in Nazi Germany and his bid to stop the Second World War. In the world of espionage, where the accounts of renowned spies often dominate the narrative, this is a rare gem - an untold story of a completely unknown spy. Baron William de Ropp, a Baltic German aristocrat, wasn't just any ordinary spy; he was MI6's top secret agent in Nazi Germany from 1931 to 1939, managing to escape Berlin just before war broke out. This unsung hero had direct access to Adolf Hitler and an inside track on the Nazi regime.

In Summer of Blood, the first history of the German Peasants' War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war's victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation. By recovering what the people themselves felt and believed, Summer of Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants' fight to change the world.

Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck, the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule.

Now capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin rose from insignificant origins on swampy soil, becoming a city of immigrants over the ages. Through a series of ten vignettes, Mary Fulbrook discusses the periods and regimes that shaped its character—whether Prussian militarism; courtly culture and enlightenment; rapid industrialization and expansion; ambitious imperialism; experiments with democracy; or repressive dictatorships of both right and left, dramatically evidenced in the violence of World War and genocide, and then in the Wall dividing Cold War Berlin.

Built by slave labour in the early years of the eighteenth century, Saint Petersburg was Peter the Great’s so-called ‘window on to Europe’, a city that would outdo all of Europe in its splendour. But a window works both ways, and as bestselling historian Sinclair McKay writes, St Petersburg has always been a city that has drawn Westerners who wanted to see into Russia. It is also a city where much has happened.

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew.

Born in 1781 in a small impoverished duchy of Germany, Julie's quiet life took a fairy-tale turn when she married into the Russian Imperial Family - the Romanovs. But this world of baroque splendour, of opulent palaces and grandeur, was no happily ever after. Taken to Russia at just fourteen, her marriage was hastily brokered to save the Saxe-Coburg duchy from financial ruin. Her husband, Grand Duke Konstantin, was cruel and abusive, Julie was uprooted from her home, family, language and culture.

Returning to Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, Fritz Bauer – a gay Jewish lawyer and outspoken critic of Hitler – was determined to reclaim the Germany he had once loved. But he soon saw that the perpetrators of the Holocaust had largely got away with their crimes. Top Nazi officers – mass-murders and cruel sadists – had been given plum jobs at major German companies; held prestigious offices in top universities; were in positions of power as lawyers, judges and political advisors.