Jefferson Chase
autor
Summer of Freedom
This colorful post–World War II history brings to life a crucial yet understudied period, through the eyes of both major figures and ordinary people.It was a summer like no one had ever experienced: in the four months from May to September 1945, the old world collapsed, and a new one opened up. The heinous Third Reich was over, ushering in an era of freedom, but also fresh conflicts.With a gripping historical panorama, Oliver Hilmes offers insight into this unprecedented summer, from the perspectives of the victors and the vanquished, victims and perpetrators, celebrities and unknowns. The “Big Three”—Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—determine the course of history at the Potsdam Conference. German housewife Else Tietze fears for her son’s safety. US soldier Klaus Mann tracks down Nazi criminals. And in Berlin Billy Wilder plans a comedy about life in the ruins. Cafés and restaurants reopen their doors, and Red Army soldier Vasily Petrowitsch is begged for bread by German children.Through a series of scenes that lead from Berlin to Tokyo, from Munich to Paris, from Bayreuth to Moscow, Hilmes captures the unique atmosphere of this time of extremes: the great happiness and hope of the liberated; the misery, grief, and fear of the defeated; and the uncertainty that comes with freedom.
Hitler - Volume I: Ascent 1889-1939
Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Fuhrer had no private life. Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Fuhrer. While charting in detail Hitler's life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Fuhrer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile - and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the cliched image of the monster. This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.
Hitler - Volume I: Ascent 1889-1939
Selected as a Book of the Year by the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement and The Times
Despite his status as the most despised political figure in history, there have only been four serious biographies of Hitler since the 1930s. Even more surprisingly, his biographers have been more interested in his rise to power and his methods of leadership than in Hitler the person: some have even declared that the Führer had no private life.
Yet to render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence and poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct our perception of the Führer. While charting in detail Hitler’s life from his childhood to the eve of the Second World War against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming and repulsive traits, his talents and weaknesses, his deep-seated insecurities and murderous passions.
Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, this magisterial study provides the most rounded portrait of Hitler to date. Ullrich renders the Führer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile — and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the clichéd image of the monster.
This definitive biography will forever change the way we look at the man who took the world into the abyss.
The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis
The shocking true story of the German monarchy's collaboration with the Nazis - already a bestseller in Germany, now in English for the first time.
**AWARDED THE GERMAN NON-FICTION PRIZE 2022**
'Malinowksi's work is a near-masterpiece, relating a story not synthesised in this way before, and about which any number of self-serving myths exist' - Simon Heffer, The Telegraph
'Stephan Malinowski's brilliant book strikes a balance between the forensic analysis of individual behaviour and a new understanding of how the toxic political culture of a defeated monarchy helped to disrupt democracy in Germany' - Christopher Clark
The disappearance of the Hohenzollern family from the history of Germany in November 1918 as the Kaiser fled into Dutch exile is one of the most startling, rapid instances of a once all-powerful royal family becoming almost overnight irrelevant and marginal. Except this is not exactly what happened.
Stephan Malinowski's German bestseller is an extraordinary work of recovery. It suited both the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to view the Hohenzollerns with contempt, and yet the royal family's hatred of the former and approval of the latter were for millions of Germans a significant factor in their own view of their country and its government.
With forensic and often shocking detail, Malinowski shows that, far from being ridiculous, marginal figures the Hohenzollerns lay at the heart of Germany's ongoing nightmare. Despite formally losing power, the members of the royal family remained prominent, catastrophically allowing many other conservative Germans to stay distanced from the new republic and to eventually betray conservative traditions and values. Battered from both left and right, the Republic collapsed in 1933 in part because conservative forces, fearful of both Communism and Fascism, had abandoned their own principles just as much as the leading members of former royal family had, who were themselves beguiled by and fooled by Hitler.
This is an important and shocking book, as well as a devastating picture of an inadequate and trivial royal family painfully underequipped to fulfil its role.
Vypredané
51,95 €
