Download or read book The New Society written by Walther Rathenau and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Walther Rathenau written by Shulamit Volkov and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) tells of a man who—both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish—rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position of foreign minister in the early days of the Weimar Republic. His achievement was unprecedented—no Jew in Germany had ever attained such high political rank. But Rathenau's success was marked by tragedy: within months he was assassinated by right-wing extremists seeking to destroy the newly formed Republic. Drawing on Rathenau's papers and on a depth of knowledge of both modern German and German-Jewish history, Shulamit Volkov creates a finely drawn portrait of this complex man who struggled with his Jewish identity yet treasured his “otherness.” Volkov also places Rathenau in the dual context of Imperial and Weimar Germany and of Berlin's financial and intellectual elite. Above all, she illuminates the complex social and psychological milieu of German Jewry in the period before Hitler's rise to power.
Download or read book Walther Rathenau and German Society written by Peter Jacob Loewenberg and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Defying Hitler written by Sebastian Haffner and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defying Hitler was written in 1939 and focuses on the year 1933, when, as Hitler assumed power, its author was a 25-year-old German law student, in training to join the German courts as a junior administrator. His book tries to answer two questions people have been asking since the end of World War II: “How were the Nazis possible?” and “Why did no one stop them?” Sebastian Haffner’s vivid first-person account, written in real time and only much later discovered by his son, makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible. “An astonishing memoir... [a] masterpiece.” — Gabriel Schoenfeld, The New York Times Book Review “A short, stabbing, brilliant book... It is important, first, as evidence of what one intelligent German knew in the 1930s about the unspeakable nature of Nazism, at a time when the overwhelming majority of his countrymen claim to have know nothing at all. And, second, for its rare capacity to reawaken anger about those who made the Nazis possible.” — Max Hastings, The Sunday Telegraph “Defying Hitler communicates one of the most profound and absolute feelings of exile that any writer has gotten between covers.” — Charles Taylor, Salon “Sebastian Haffner was Germany’s political conscience, but it is only now that we can read how he experienced the Nazi terror himself — that is a memoir of frightening relevance today.” — Heinrich Jaenicke, Stern “The prophetic insights of a fairly young man... help us understand the plight, as Haffner refers to it, of the non-Nazi German.” — The Denver Post “Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler is a most brilliant and imaginative book — one of the most important books we have ever published.” — Lord Weidenfeld
Download or read book Germans Jews and Antisemites written by Shulamit Volkov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ferocity of the Nazi attack upon the Jews took many by surprise. Volkov argues that a new look at both the nature of antisemitism and at the complexity of modern Jewish life in Germany is required in order to provide an explanation. While antisemitism had a number of functions in pre-Nazi German society, it most particularly served as a cultural code, a sign of belonging to a particular political and cultural milieu. Surprisingly, it only had a limited effect on the lives of the Jews themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, their integration was well advanced. Many of them enjoyed prosperity, prestige, and the pleasures of metropolitan life. This book stresses the dialectical nature of assimilation, the lead of the Jews in the processes of modernization, and, finally, their continuous efforts to 'invent' a modern Judaism that would fit their new social and cultural position.
Download or read book The Seduction of Culture in German History written by Wolf Lepenies and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Allied bombing of Germany, Hitler was more distressed by the loss of cultural treasures than by the leveling of homes. Remarkably, his propagandists broadcast this fact, convinced that it would reveal not his callousness but his sensitivity: the destruction had failed to crush his artist's spirit. It is impossible to begin to make sense of this thinking without understanding what Wolf Lepenies calls The Seduction of Culture in German History. This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit--that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art. In a series of historical, intellectual, literary, and artistic vignettes told in an essayistic style full of compelling aphorisms, this wide-ranging book pays special attention to Goethe and Thomas Mann, and also contains brilliant discussions of such diverse figures as Novalis, Walt Whitman, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom. The Seduction of Culture in German History is concerned not only with Germany, but with how the German obsession with culture, sense of cultural superiority, and scorn of politics have affected its relations with other countries, France and the United States in particular.
Download or read book Einstein s German World written by Fritz Stern and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.
Download or read book What Ifs of Jewish History written by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterfactual history of the Jewish past inviting readers to explore how the course of Jewish history might have been different.
Download or read book The Outlaws written by Ernst Von Salomon and published by Arktos. This book was released on 2013 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is November 1918. Germany has just surrendered after four years of the most savage warfare in history. It is teetering on the brink of total social and economic collapse, and the German people now lie at the mercy of new, liberal politicians who despise everything Germany once stood for. The Communists are rioting in the streets, threatening to topple the new government in Weimar and bring about their own revolution. The frontline soldiers are returning from the hell of the war to find an unrecognizable land, the principles and traditions they had sacrificed so much to defend now the stuff of mockery. The narrator of The Outlaws, a 16-year-old military cadet, is too young to have served in the trenches, but feels the sting of this betrayal no less than they. Since Germany's armies have been all but disbanded, he joins the paramilitary Freikorps - groups of veterans who refuse to lay down their arms, and who have pledged to stop the Communists - and begins fighting, first in the streets of Germany's cities, and then in the Baltic states, defending Germany's eastern frontiers from Communist subversion while ignoring the calls to disengage by the meek politicians at home. After months of intense fighting abroad, the Freikorps soldiers return to settle scores with their enemies in Germany, dreaming of a nationalist counter-revolution, and, their trigger fingers still itchy, fix their sights on bringing down the hated new government once and for all... The Outlaws is a chronicle of the experiences of the men who fought in the Freikorps, but it is also an adventure and a war story about an entire generation of soldiers who loved their homeland more than peace and comfort, and who refused to accept defeat at any price. "What we wanted we did not know; but what we knew we did not want. To force a way through the prisoning wall of the world, to march over burning fields, to stamp over ruins and scattered ashes, to dash recklessly through wild forests, over blasted heaths, to push, conquer, eat our way through towards the East, to the white, hot, dark, cold land that stretched between ourselves and Asia - was that what we wanted? I do not know whether that was our desire, but that was what we did. And the search for reasons why was lost in the tumult of continuous fighting." - p. 65 Ernst von Salomon (1902-1972) was one of the writers of the German Conservative Revolution of the 1920s. Like the narrator of The Outlaws, he was a military cadet at the end of the First World War, and joined the Freikorps, participating in many of the events described in the book, including the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, for which he was imprisoned. He went on to write many books and film scripts.
Download or read book Germany in the Age of Total War written by Volker R. Berghahn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1981 and now re-issued with a new Preface, this book contains contributions on key issues such as the origins of the First World War, the psychological impact of that war on the Germans, the enigmatic personality of Walter Rathenau, anti-semitism and paramilitarism, as well as German Ostpolitik during the Weimar period. The collapse of the Weimar Republic is re-examined and this is followed by an analysis of the social basis of the SS leadership corps, German reactions to the defeat in 1945 as observed by the British authorities and finally a wide-ranging comparatiste essay on why Germany did not experience a 20th century revolution in spite of the tremendous upheavals it suffered.
Download or read book The Weimar Republic Sourcebook written by Anton Kaes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduces (translated into English) contemporary documents or writings with an introduction to each section.
Download or read book What I Saw written by Joseph Roth and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Joseph Roth] is now recognized as one of the twentieth century's great writers." --Anthony Heilbut, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Download or read book Central Europe written by Friedrich Naumann and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Regulating the Social written by George Steinmetz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1993-08-09 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does the welfare state develop so unevenly across countries, regions, and localities? What accounts for the exclusions and disciplinary features of social programs? How are elite and popular conceptions of social reality related to welfare policies? George Steinmetz approaches these and other issues by exploring the complex origins and development of local and national social policies in nineteenth-century Germany. Generally regarded as the birthplace of the modern welfare state, Germany experimented with a wide variety of social programs before 1914, including the national social insurance legislation of the 1880s, the "Elberfeld" system of poor relief, protocorporatist policies, and modern forms of social work. Imperial Germany offers a particularly useful context in which to compare different programs at various levels of government. Looking at changes in welfare policy over the course of the nineteenth century, differences between state and municipal interventions, and intercity variations in policy, Steinmetz develops an account that focuses on the specific constraints on local and national policymakers and the different ways of imagining the "social question." Whereas certain aspects of the pre-1914 welfare state reinforced social divisions and even foreshadowed aspects of the Nazi regime, other dimensions actually helped to relieve sickness, poverty, and unemployment. Steinmetz explores the conditions that led to both the positive and the objectionable features of social policy. The explanation draws on statist, Marxist, and social democratic perspectives and on theories of gender and culture.
Download or read book A History of Modern Germany written by Dietrich Orlow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the entire period of modern German history - from nineteenth-century imperial Germany right through the present - this well-established text presents a balanced, general survey of the country's political division in 1945 and runs through its reunification in the present. Detailing foreign policy as well as political, economic and social developments, A History of Modern Germany presents a central theme of the problem of asymmetrical modernization in the country's history as it fully explores the complicated path of Germany's troubled past and stable present.
Download or read book Passing Illusions written by Kerry Wallach and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the notion that Weimar Jews sought to be invisible or indistinguishable from other Germans by "passing" as non-Jews
Download or read book Wilhelminism and Its Legacies written by Geoff Eley and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was distinctive—and distinctively "modern"—about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently "bourgeois" formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany's extraordinarily dynamic society, they also grapple with the ambivalent, cross-cutting nature of German "modernities" and reassess their impact on long-term developments running through the Wilhelmine age.
