Download or read book Why the Germans Do It Better written by John Kampfner and published by Atlantic Books (UK). This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging from a collection of city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a critical and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate. Raising important questions for our post-Brexit landscape, Kampfner asks why, despite its faults, Germany has become a model for others to emulate, while Britain fails to tackle contemporary challenges. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, Why the Germans Do It Better is a rich and witty portrait of an eternally fascinating country.
Download or read book Why the Germans Do it Better written by John Kampfner and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*** BOOK OF THE YEAR IN GUARDIAN, ECONOMIST & NEW STATESMAN 'Excellent and provocative... a passionate, timely book.' Sunday Times 'A fine new book... thoughtful, deeply reported and impeccably even-handed.' The Times Emerging from a collection of city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a critical and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate. Raising important questions for our post-Brexit landscape, Kampfner asks why, despite its faults, Germany has become a model for others to emulate, while Britain fails to tackle contemporary challenges. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, Why the Germans Do It Better is a rich and witty portrait of an eternally fascinating country.
Download or read book Reluctant Meister written by Stephen Green and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Euro crisis has served as a stark reminder of the fundamental importance of Germany to the larger European project. But the image of Germany as the dominant power in Europe is at odds with much of its recent history. Reluctant Meister is a wide-ranging study of Germany from the Holy Roman Empire through the Second and Third Reichs, and it asks not only how such a mature and developed culture could have descended into the barbarism of Nazism but how it then rebuilt itself within a generation to become an economic powerhouse. Perhaps most important, Stephen Green examines to what extent Germany will come to dominate its relationship with its neighbors in the European Union, and what that will mean.
Download or read book Learning from the Germans written by Susan Neiman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past 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. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.
Download or read book Why the Germans Why the Jews written by Götz Aly and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Countless historians have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and insightful as those of maverick German historian Götz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism was—to a previously overlooked extent—driven in large part by material concerns, not racist ideology or religious animosity. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. This success aroused envy and fear among the Gentile population, creating fertile ground for murderous Nazi politics. Surprisingly, and controversially, Aly shows that the roots of the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with German efforts to create greater social equality. Redistributing wealth from the well-off to the less fortunate was in many respects a laudable goal, particularly at a time when many lived in poverty. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. Aly's account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.
Download or read book Orderly and Humane written by R. M. Douglas and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.
Download or read book Germania written by Simon Winder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A UNIQUE EXPLORATION OF GERMAN CULTURE, FROM SAUSAGE ADVERTISEMENTS TO WAGNER Sitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?" This book is an attempt to answer that question. Why spend time wandering around a country that remains a sort of dead zone for many foreigners, surrounded as it is by a force field of historical, linguistic, climatic, and gastronomic barriers? Winder's book is propelled by a wish to reclaim the brilliant, chaotic, endlessly varied German civilization that the Nazis buried and ruined, and that, since 1945, so many Germans have worked to rebuild. Germania is a very funny book on serious topics—how we are misled by history, how we twist history, and how sometimes it is best to know no history at all. It is a book full of curiosities: odd food, castles, mad princes, fairy tales, and horse-mating videos. It is about the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape.
Download or read book They Thought They Were Free written by Milton Mayer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes 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 ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
Download or read book Doing Business in Germany written by Andra Riemhofer and published by Business Expert Press. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of the book is to help readers understand how certain concepts and values influence the way Germans like to do business. Germany is the strongest economy in Europe, and one of the largest worldwide. The business climate is good, people are highly skilled, and consumers have plenty of spending money in their pockets; for companies that are doing business internationally, Germany is a market that simply cannot be overlooked. However, many business relationships with Germans come to an end even before they begin; intercultural differences very often result in misunderstandings, frustration, and an unnecessary loss of time and money. Especially with Germans, even small things can be crucial when you are speaking to a (potential) business contact. This book aims at helping students and professionals avoid the common pitfalls that international business people typically step into when dealing with Germans for the very first time. Unlike with the other business- or text-books focusing on culture, this book will do more than just arm you with some simple “Dos and Don’ts;” it will provide interesting and easy-to- understand descriptions and anecdotes that highlight the cultural standards and dimensions that are (typically) theoretically discussed in scientific texts. Essentially, while talking about what makes “the average” German tick, readers will be equipped with the relevant background knowledge. The focus of the book is to help readers understand how certain concepts and values influence the way Germans like to do business. It will guide them on how to successfully interact with Germans, whether at trade shows, during virtual and face-to-face meetings, or when they are negotiating their first contract.
Download or read book German Men Sit Down to Pee and Other Insights Into German Culture written by MR Niklas Frank and published by Hj Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to Germany, a country where you should always wait at the red man, show up on time for your wedding, and be extremely suspicious if anyone offers you a doughnut. 'German men sit down to pee' is a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to German culture that highlights the rules Germans consciously and unconsciously follow, while trying to make a little sense of it all along the way. Why, for example, mowing your lawn on a Sunday will mean getting an earful from your neighbour, but lie naked in the middle of a public park and nobody will bat an eyelid. Ideal for anyone visiting or moving to Germany, 'German Men Sit Down to Pee' offers a collection of insights into German culture while at the same time highlighting rules and cultural norms that those visiting Germany will not only find humorous but useful for avoiding any cultural faux-pas.
Download or read book Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book The Seven Secrets of Germany written by David B. Audretsch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe and much of the developed world have been bogged down by stagnant economic growth and alarmingly high rates of unemployment. But not Germany. This book reveals seven key aspects of the German economy and society that have provided considerable buoyance in an era of global turbulence.
Download or read book Belonging written by Nora Krug and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
Download or read book In the garden of beasts written by Erik Larson and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the 'New Germany,' she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance - and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.
Download or read book Germany written by Hagen Schulze and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of Germany, covering two thousand years from the revolt of the indigenous tribes against Roman domination to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Download or read book The Myth of Chinese Capitalism written by Dexter Roberts and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how restrictive policies are preventing China from becoming the world’s largest economy Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today’s financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered. He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in the province of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away to become migrants; and Dongguan, China’s most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country’s biggest manufacturing base. Within these two towns and the people that move between them, Roberts focuses on the story of the Mo family, former farmers-turned-migrant-workers who are struggling to make a living in a fast-changing country that relegates one-half of its people to second-class status via household registration, land tenure policies and inequality in education and health care systems. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts brings to life the problems that China and its people face today as they attempt to overcome a divisive system that poses a serious challenge to the country’s future development. In so doing, Roberts paints a boot-on-the-ground cautionary picture of China for a world now held in its financial thrall. Dexter Roberts is an award-winning journalist and a regular commentator on the U.S.-China trade and political relationship. His prior speaking engagements include traditional news media outlets (NPR, Fox News, CNN International) as well as universities and institutes (George Washington University, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Overseas Press Club). He is available for virtual classroom visits to courses that adopt The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
Download or read book The Women in the Castle written by Jessica Shattuck and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE NEW CHAPTER GoodReads Choice Awards Semifinalist "Moving . . . a plot that surprises and devastates."—New York Times Book Review "A masterful epic."—People magazine "Mesmerizing . . . The Women in the Castle stands tall among the literature that reveals new truths about one of history’s most tragic eras."—USA Today Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined—an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges. Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale, Sarah’s Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck’s evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.
