Germany European History

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.

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.

The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a 10-day journey across the front lines of World War II from Germany back to Paris. Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times.

The Holy Roman Empire lasted 1,000 years, far longer than ancient Rome. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. Voltaire quipped that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet as Peter H. Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empire tells a millennial story of Europe better than the histories of individual nation-states.

Frederick the Great is one of history's most important leaders. Famed for his military successes and domestic reforms, his campaigns were a watershed in the history of Europe, securing Prussia's place as a continental power and inaugurating a new pattern of total war that was to endure until 1916. However, much myth surrounds this enigmatic man's personality and his role as politician, warrior, and king.

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.

From 1934 until 1944, Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both countries. While Germany is generally regarded as the senior power, Christian Goeschel demonstrates just how much history has underrepresented Mussolini's influence on his German ally. Goeschel, a scholar of 20th-century Germany and Italy, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler's key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public.

From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before.

Drawing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler's Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion - and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain.

This volume in a series of world history case studies investigates the career of East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht, one of the few communist leaders to live long enough to experience the most important events of the twentieth century. Too often discounted or ignored by historians, this ever-calculating man survived World War I, Hitler’s rise to power, Stalinism, and World War II to become the architect of Berlin Wall and a man committed to creating a utopian socialist state at any cost. Ulbricht’s perspective helps us to understand Europe’s modern history in a new way.

A thrilling day-by-day account of the final months of the Weimar Republic, documenting the collapse of democracy in Germany and Hitler's frightening rise to power.

This fictional work assumes that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his Berlin bunker toward the end of World War II, but instead, was able to survive and escape to South America. This work presents the author’s reflection of the meaning of Nazism and fascism and attempts to extract that meaning from Hitler’s life and final words.

This fictional work assumes that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his Berlin bunker toward the end of World War II, but instead, was able to survive and escape to South America. This work presents the author’s reflection of the meaning of Nazism and fascism and attempts to extract that meaning from Hitler’s life and final words.

At the end of 1941, it seemed to many people, especially in Germany, that the war was virtually over. Some began to consider what a postwar Europe would look like after a Nazi victory. With nothing to stop them, the Nazis became the most rapacious looters of art the world had ever seen, to the extent that it has been estimated that the Nazis may have acquired up to 20 percent of all art in Western Europe. Some works were returned after the war, many disappeared, and still others have become the subject of intense speculation.

So many heroes have been lost to history and this book attempts to bring the reader's attention to two great men who by working in harmony were able to transform the fate of Prussia. Gertha von Dieckmann originally wrote this book in German in 1930. Today, the book contains so many intimate insights into the workings in the administration of the Prussian states during and after the French occupation that it has become relevant for the modern reader. For the first time this work has been now translated into English and will provide valuable insights into the background which undoubtedly led ...

In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a 19-year-old Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labor, and extermination. Marie took off her yellow star, turned her back on the Jewish community, and vanished into the city. In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate.