Germans Germany

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined.

A country both admired and feared, Germany has been the epicenter of world events time and again: the Reformation, both World Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not emerge as a modern nation until 1871 - yet today, Germany is the world's fourth-largest economy and a standard-bearer of liberal democracy.

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power.

In December 1943, with the rising realization that the Allies are planning to invade Fortress Europe, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is assigned the title of General Inspector for the Atlantic Wall. His mission is to assess their readiness. His superior, theater commander, crusty old Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had led the Reich to victory in the early years of the war, is now fed up with the whole Nazi regime. He lives comfortably in a plush villa in a quiet Paris suburb, waiting for the inevitable Allied invasion that will bring about their final defeat.

Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring 39 individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France - all without destroying itself in the process?

First published in 1955, 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 10 Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany.

For decades after 1945, it was generally believed that the German army, professional and morally decent, had largely stood apart from the SS, Gestapo, and other corps of the Nazi machine. Ben Shepherd draws on a wealth of primary sources and recent scholarship to convey a much darker, more complex picture. For the first time, the German army is examined throughout the Second World War, across all combat theaters and occupied regions, and from multiple perspectives: its battle performance, social composition, relationship with the Nazi state, and involvement in war crimes and occupation.

Germany is one of the richest and most influential countries in the world, which is amazing when you consider that the nation is only about the size of the US states of Oregon and Washington combined. It’s even more astounding when you consider that at the end of World War II, every major German city (and many minor ones) had been flattened by the Allied bombing campaign. Still more amazing is that the country has gone from international pariah and home of the Holocaust to one of the most well-regarded and humanitarian nations on Earth.

In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”

Berlin, 1930—When a wave of change sweeps a radical political party to power, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes’s academic husband benefits from the ambitions of its newly elected chancellor. Although Sofie and Jürgen do not share the social views growing popular in Hitler’s Germany, Jürgen’s position with its burgeoning rocket program changes their diminishing fortunes for the better. But as Sofie watches helplessly, her beloved Berlin begins to transform, forcing her to consider what they must sacrifice morally for their young family’s security, and what the price for their neutrality will be.

In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.

The German Revolution of November 1918 is nowadays largely forgotten outside Germany. It is generally regarded as a failure even by those who have heard of it, a missed opportunity that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and the catastrophe to come. Robert Gerwarth argues here that to view the German Revolution in this way is a serious misjudgment. Not only did it bring down the authoritarian monarchy of the Hohenzollern, it also brought into being the first ever German democracy in an amazingly bloodless way.

By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death - for themselves and for their children.

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting. Iron and Blood takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically.

World War II began with a metallic roar as the German Blitzkrieg raced across Europe, spearheaded by the most dreaded weapon of the 20th century: the Panzer. No German tank better represents that thundering power than the infamous Tiger, and Otto Carius was one of the most successful commanders to ever take a Tiger into battle, destroying well over 150 enemy tanks during his incredible career.

In Prevail Until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises.

In this compelling biography, historian A. J. P. Taylor reevaluates Bismarck's motives and methods, focusing on the chancellor's rise to power in the 1860s and his removal from office in 1890.

As early as 1941, Allied victory in World War II seemed all but assured. How and why, then, did the Germans prolong the barbaric conflict for three and a half more years? In The German War, acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials - personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence - to answer this question. He offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people to vivid life.

May 1945. Hitler is dead, and the Third Reich is little more than smoking rubble. No GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Nazis. But for cigar-chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-charging Captain Jack Lee and his men, there is one more mission: rescue 14 prominent French prisoners held in an SS-guarded castle high in the Austrian Alps. It's a dangerous mission, but Lee has help from a decorated German Wehrmacht officer and his men, who voluntarily join the fight.

In this classic work of twentieth-century history, William Sheridan Allen demonstrates how dictatorship subtly surmounted democracy in Germany and how the Nazi seizure of power encroached from below. Relying upon legal records and interviews with primary sources, Allen dissects Northeim, Germany with microscopic precision to depict the transformation of a sleepy town to a Nazi stronghold. This cogent analysis argues that Hitler rose to power primarily through democratic tactics that incited localized support rather than through violent means.