West Germany

How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust - and features over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.

For seven decades, our understanding of World War II has been shaped by a standard narrative built on conventional wisdom, propaganda, the dramatic but narrow experiences of soldiers on the ground, and an early generation of historians. For his new history, James Holland has spent over 12 years unearthing new research, recording original testimony, and visiting battlefields and archives that have never before been so accessible.

In the summer of 1961, a wall of barbed wire goes up quickly in the dead of night, officially dividing Berlin. Luisa Voigt lives in West Berlin, but her grandmother lives across the border and is now trapped inside the newly isolated communist country of East Germany. Desperate to rescue her grandmother and aware of the many others whose families have been divided, Luisa joins a secret spy network, risking her life to help bring others through a makeshift underground tunnel to West Germany. Their work is dangerous, and not everyone will successfully escape or live to see freedom.

In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany's leading historian of the 20th century's first great catastrophe explains the war's origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora's Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the everyday tactics of dynamic movement and slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers.

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 tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne’s empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture’s birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.

In the wake of World War II, the European continent was devastated, and the conflict left the Soviet Union and the United States as uncontested superpowers. This ushered in over 45 years of the Cold War, and a political alignment of Western democracies against the Communist Soviet bloc that produced conflicts pitting allies on each sides fighting. By the 1960s, East Germany was pushing for a solution to the problem of an enclave of freedom within its borders. West Berlin was a haven for highly-educated East Germans who wanted freedom and a better life in the West.

In the aftermath of World War II, Prussia - a centuries-old state pivotal to Europe's development - ceased to exist. In their eagerness to erase all traces of the Third Reich from the earth, the Allies believed that Prussia, the very embodiment of German militarism, had to be abolished. But as Christopher Clark reveals in this pioneering history, Prussia's legacy is far more complex.

Propelled by a wish to reclaim the brilliant, chaotic, endlessly varied German civilization that the Nazis buried and ruined, and that so many Germans have worked to rebuild, Germania was recorded to enlighten us on serious topics, curiosities, and on the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape.

A few years ago Eric and I talked about doing a 1632 WarSpell crossover. The idea was that a bunch of gamers playing WarSpell would set their game in a copy of the 1632 universe, but with a little bit of magic. Paula and I wrote the book and then Eric decided that he didn't want to do the crossover. The story was fine and Ring of Fire Press would have published it, but he wanted it changed so that it was no longer a 1632 crossover. That was because he didn't want people starting to think that this was part of the 1632 Canon, At the time I had been thinking that I would have to change ...

With Allied armies poised on the banks of the Rhine, Nazi Germany tottered on the brink of collapse. The ensuing battles on German soil - especially those in the so-called Ruhr Pocket - were as fierce and hard-fought as any in the European theater. Going well beyond previous accounts, Derek S. Zumbro chronicles this key military campaign from a unique and fresh perspective - that of the defeated German soldiers and civilians caught in the final maelstrom of the war's Western front.

In this dramatic account of the 1944-45 winter of war in Bastogne, historian Peter Schrijvers offers the first full story of the German assault on the strategically located town. From the December stampede of American and Panzer divisions racing to reach Bastogne first, through the bloody eight-day siege from land and air, and through three more weeks of unrelenting fighting even after the siege was broken, events at Bastogne hastened the long-awaited end of WWII.

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.

Stefan Austs Buch ist keine Anklageschrift und nicht das Plädoyer eines Verteidigers, es ist auch kein Urteil, weder in juristischer noch in moralischer Hinsicht. Es soll ein Protokoll sein, eine Chronik der Ereignisse vom Juni 1967, als der Student Benno Ohnesorg von einem Polizisten erschossen wurde, bis zum "Deutschen Herbst" 1977, der Entführung und späteren Ermordung des Arbeitgeberpräsidenten Hanns Martin Schleyer, der Entführung und Befreiung der Passagiere und Besatzungsmitglieder der Lufthansa-Maschine "Landshut" und den Selbstmorden im Hochsicherheitstrakt von Stammheim.

Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using "reckoning" in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely through time. Fulbrook exposes the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past" and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility.

The Decline of the West - Volume 1 published in 1917, Volume 2 in 1922 - has exercised and challenged opinion ever since. It was a huge undertaking by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), formerly an unpublished historian and philosopher who set out to radically reconsider history - the rise and fall of world civilisations and their cultures. His primary view was to reject the established Eurocentric paradigm (ancient/classical, Medieval - and, following the Renaissance - modern) and to take a totally new perspective.

During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war - the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare.

In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins.

A new identity. A new job. A new life. But the past is never far behind. Ewe Bohn, a man who thought he had buried his former self, is lured back into the shadows of his old profession. In post-war Germany, where loyalties are as fragile as the crumbling walls around him, Bohn's skills are once again in high demand by the CIA. The Gehlen Organization, a covert network of former Nazi operatives now serving the West, is expanding rapidly to counter the rising threats from the Soviet Union and the newly minted East Germany. As Bohn plunges deeper into this dangerous world, he must decide how ...

From the New York Times best-selling author comes the definitive history of one of the greatest battles ever fought - a riveting nonfiction chronicle published to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Napoleon's last stand.