The 100 Greatest German History Books
The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989 by Lear 21 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The 100 Greatest German History Books list covers modern Germany, including Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and Post-1945 history (the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and reunification).
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The 100 Best European History Books
1. A Concise History of Germany
This third edition of Mary Fulbrook's much-admired and popular introduction to German history provides a clear and informative guide to the twists and turns of the story of the German lands and peoples from the early middle ages to the present day. Crisply synthesising a vast array of ... More »
2. German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation
This history of German-speaking central Europe offers a very wide perspective, emphasizing a succession of many-layered communal identities. It highlights the interplay of individual, society, culture, and political power, contrasting German with western patterns. Rather than treating "the Germans" as a collective whole whose national history amounts to ... More »
3. A History of Modern Germany: 1871 to Present
A History of Modern Germany is a well-established text that presents a balanced survey of the last 150 years of German history, stretching from nineteenth-century imperial Germany, through political division and reunification, and into the present day. Beginning in the early 1870s and covering topics such as ... More »
4. Germany: The Long Road West: 1789-1933 v. 1
Vivid, succinct, and highly accessible, Heinrich Winkler's magisterial history of modern Germany offers the history of a nation and its people through two turbulent centuries. It is the story of a country that, while always culturally identified with the West, long resisted the political trajectories of its neighbours. ... More »
5. A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation
By Hajo Holborn
This first volume of a major reassessment of the last five centuries of German history deals with that age of German history which had the widest effect on the rise of modern Western civilization. Against the background of medieval culture, the author shows the origins of Luther's religion ... More »
6. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
This brilliant new book explores how, over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. It investigates how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens ... More »
7. The Origins of Modern Germany
"No one is likely to underrate the importance for the rest of Europe-and, indeed, for world history-of the German reaction, beginning in the days of Bismarck, to the crisis of modern industrial capitalism," writes Professor Barraclough, "but the peculiar character of that reaction is only comprehensible in the ... More »
8. Bismarck and the German Empire
By Lynn Abrams
Updated and expanded, this second edition of Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871-1918 is an accessible introduction to this important period in German history. Providing both a narrative of events at the time and an analysis of social and cultural developments across the period, Lynn Abrams examines ... More »
9. History of Germany, 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century
This history offers a powerful and original account of Germany from the eve of the French Revolution to the end of World War One. Written by a leading German historian who has transformed the historiography of modern Germany over the past two decades. Covers the whole of the ... More »
10. Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives
The German Empire, its structure, its dynamic development between 1871 and 1918, and its legacy, have been the focus of lively international debate that is showing signs of further intensification as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Based on recent work and scholarly ... More »
11. The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800-1871
This book contains many accounts of German unification focus on war, diplomacy and Bismarck and on the crucial ten years up to 1871. John Breuilly, in addition to paying attention to those issues, extends the analysis back to 1800. He also takes into account social, economic and cultural ... More »
12. Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism
Germany's and Italy's belated national unifications continue to loom large in contemporary debates. Often regarded as Europe's paradigmatic instances of failed modernization, the two countries form the basis of many of our most prized theories of social science. Structuring the State undertakes one of the first systematic comparisons ... More »
13. Germany, 1870-1945: Politics, State Formation, and War
By Peter Pulzer
Germany, 1870-1945 deals with the three attempts to build a German nation-state between 1871 and 1945, and the reasons for their failure. Haunted by the specter of the abortive liberal-national revolution of 1848-49, German politicians sought a series of solutions, none of which found a constitutional consensus, and ... More »
14. Germany 1800-1870
The years 1800-1871 were a crucial formative phase of modern German history. This volume, written by an international team of experts, provides a comprehensive overview of the era. It includes a narrative of the major political events and detailed studies of economy and society, culture and the arts, ... More »
15. The German Empire, 1871-1918
In the wake of the Fischer Controversy on the origins of World War I there emerged in West Germany a younger generation of historians who took a critical 'revisionist' view of the Bismarckian Empire and began to analyze the political development of the Hohenzollern monarchy against the background ... More »
16. Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904-1908 and Its Aftermath
By Jurgen Zimmerer; Joachim Zeller; E. J. Neather
The 1904 war that broke out in present day Namibia after the Herero tribe rose against an oppressive colonial regime-and the German army's brutal suppression of that uprising-are the focus of this collection of essays. Exploring the annihilation of both the Herero and Nama people, this selection from ... More »
17. Germany 1866-1945
Examines the people, parties, and pressure groups that shaped Germany's domestic and foreign policy from 1866 onward and the factors and events leading to two world wars and to the Third Reich More »
18. Imperial Germany and the Great War
This book explores the impact of the First World War on Imperial Germany and examines military aspects of the conflict, as well as the diplomacy, politics, and industrial mobilization of wartime Germany. Including maps, tables, and illustrations, it also offers a rich portrait of life on the home ... More »
19. The Nation as a Local Metaphor
By Alon Confino
All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of ... More »
20. Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck
By Geoff Eley
Reshaping the German Right examines the conditions under which a particular right-wing ideology was generated. More »
21. The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763-1867
The arduous path from the colorful diversity of the Holy Roman Empire to the Prussian-dominated German nation-state, Bismarck's German Empire of 1871, led through revolutions, wars and economic upheavals, but also through the cultural splendor of German Classicism and Romanticism. Hagen Schulze takes a fresh look at late ... More »
22. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany
What happens when manhood suffrage, a radically egalitarian institution, gets introduced into a deeply hierarchical society? In her sweeping history of Imperial Germany's electoral culture, Anderson shows how the sudden opportunity to "practice" democracy in 1867 opened up a free space in the land of Kaisers, generals, and ... More »
23. The German Army League
This book traces the development of the German Army League from its inception through the earliest days of the Weimar Republic. Founded in January 1912, the League promoted the intensification of German militarism and the cultivation of German nationalism. As the last and second largest of the patriotic ... More »
24. German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism
By Donna Harsch
German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism explores the failure of Germany's largest political party to stave off the Nazi threat to the Weimar republic. In 1928 members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were elected to the chancellorship and thousands of state and municipal offices. But ... More »
25. Germany after the First World War
A social history of Germany in the years following the First World War, this book explores Germany's defeat and the subsequent demobilization of its armies, events which had devastating social and psychological consequences for the nation. Bessel examines the changes brought by the War to Germany, including those ... More »
26. German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial
Is it true that the German army, invading Belgium and France in August 1914, perpetrated brutal atrocities? Or are accounts of the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians mere fabrications constructed by fanatically anti-German Allied propagandists? Based on research in the archives of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and ... More »
27. News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945
By Heidi Tworek
To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire-and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a ... More »
28. The Weimar Republic
In the first part of the book, Professor Kolb provides a clear historical narrative of the political, social, economic and cultural developments of the Weimar Republic, setting it within the international context of the inter-war period. In the second part he surveys and analyses scholarly research in the ... More »
29. Rethinking the Weimar Republic
"McElligott's impressive mastery of an enormous body of research guides him on a distinctive path through the dense thickets of Weimar historiography to a provocative new interpretation of the nature of authority in Germany's first democracy." Sir Ian Kershaw, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of ... More »
30. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy
By Hans Mommsen
In this definitive analysis of the Weimar Republic, Hans Mommsen surveys the political, social, and economic development of Germany between the end of World War I and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933. His assessment of the German experiment with democracy challenges many long-held assumptions ... More »
31. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the twentieth century-one whose influence and inspiration still resonate today. Eric Weitz has written the authoritative history that this fascinating and complex period deserves, and he illuminates the uniquely progressive ... More »
32. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
By Peter Gay
A seminal work as melodious and haunting as the era it chronicles.First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical ... More »
33. Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany
By Mary Nolan
In much the same way that Japan has become the focus of contemporary American discussion about industrial restructuring, Germans in the economic reform in terms of Americanism and Fordism, seeing in the United States an intriguing vision for a revitalized economy and a new social order. During ... More »
34. Lustmord
By Maria Tatar
In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we ... More »
35. The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939
Disabled veterans were the First World War's most conspicuous legacy. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned from the First World War permanently disabled by injury or disease. In The War Come Home, Deborah Cohen offers a comparative analysis of the very different ways in which two belligerent ... More »
36. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin
Challenging assumptions about the separation of high politics and everyday life, Belinda Davis uncovers the important influence of the broad civilian populace--particularly poorer women--on German domestic and even military policy during World War I. More »
37. The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924
This book presents a comprehensive study of the most famous and spectacular instance of inflation in modern industrial society--that in Germany during and following World War I. A broad, probing narrative, this book studies inflation as a strategy of social pacification and economic reconstruction and as a mechanism ... More »
38. Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939
This book offers a reassessment of the international monetary problems that led to the global economic crisis of the 1930s. It explores the connections between the gold standard--the framework regulating international monetary affairs until 1931--and the Great Depression that broke out in 1929. Eichengreen shows how economic policies, ... More »
39. Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler
By David Crew
The welfare state was one of the pillars of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar experiment in democracy depended to no small degree upon the welfare system's ability to give German citizens at least a fundamental level of material and mental security in the face of the new risks ... More »
40. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture
The welfare state was one of the pillars of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar experiment in democracy depended to no small degree upon the welfare system's ability to give German citizens at least a fundamental level of material and mental security in the face of the new risks ... More »
41. The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918-1933
By Sally Marks
Sally Marks provides a compelling analysis of European diplomacy between the First World War and Hitler's advent. She explores in clear and lively prose the reasons why successive efforts failed to create a lasting peace in the interwar era. Building on the theories of the first edition - ... More »
42. The Third Reich: A New History
In this riveting book, Michael Burleigh sets Nazi Germany in a European context, showing how the Third Reich's abandonment of liberal democracy, decency and tolerance was widespread in the Europe of the period. He shows how a radical, pseudo-religious movement, led by an oddity with dazzling demagogic talents, ... More »
43. Nazi Germany
By Jane Caplan
The history of National Socialism as a movement and a regime remains one of the most compelling and intensively studied aspects of twentieth-century history, one whose significance extends far beyond Germany or even Europe. Featuring ten chapters by leading international experts, this volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative ... More »
44. The Coming of the Third Reich
"The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." -A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand than Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in ... More »
45. Germans into Nazis
Why did ordinary Germans vote for Hitler? In this dramatically plotted book, organized around crucial turning points in 1914, 1918, and 1933, Peter Fritzsche explains why the Nazis were so popular and what was behind the political choice made by the German people. Rejecting the view that ... More »
46. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany
Debate still rages over how much ordinary Germans knew about the concentration camps and the Gestapo's activities during Hitler's reign. Now, in this well-documented and provocative volume, historian Robert Gellately argues that the majority of German citizens had quite a clear picture of the extent of Nazi atrocities, ... More »
47. The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich
By Ian Kershaw
Few, if any, twentieth-century political leaders have enjoyed greater popularity among their own people than Hitler did in the decade or so following his rise to power in 1933. The personality of Hitler himself, however, can scarcely explain this immense popularity or his political effectiveness in the 1930s ... More »
48. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life
In this remarkable social history of the Third Reich, Detlev J. K. Peukert surveys how ordinary citizens evaded or accepted Nazi policies of repression, terrorism, and racism. Peukert discusses not only the popular consensus that supported Nazism but also the opposition of the German middle class, working class, ... More »
49. Women in Nazi Germany
From images of jubilant mothers offering the Nazi salute, to Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels, women in Hitler's Germany and their role as supporters and guarantors of the Third Reich continue to exert a particular fascination. This account moves away from the stereotypes to provide a more complete ... More »
50. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda
By David Welch
Published in the year 1994, The Third Reich is a valuable contribution to the field of History. More »
51. Germans Against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich
By Francis R. Nicosia; Lawrence D. Stokes
Rather than being accepted by all of German society, the Nazi regime was resisted in both passive and active forms. This re-issued volume examines opposition to National Socialism by Germans during the Third Reich in its broadest sense. It considers individual and organized nonconformity, opposition, and resistance ranging ... More »
52. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
By Omer Bartov
As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it ... More »
53. On the Road to the Wolf's Lair: German Resistance to Hitler
In the beginning, they rallied behind Hitler in the national interest of Germany; in the end, they sacrificed their lives to assassinate him. A history of German resistance to Hitler in high places, this book offers a glimpse into one of the most intractable mysteries. Why did high-ranking ... More »
54. Sexuality and German Fascism
The interrelationship of fascism and sexuality has attracted a great deal of interest for some time now. This collection offers fresh perspectives by leading scholars on the history of sexuality under national socialism on such topics as the persecution of Jewish-gentile sex in the "race defilement" trials, homophobic ... More »
55. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler
By scrutinizing the major corporate archives of Weimar and Nazi Germany, the author reveals the dynamics between corporations and political machines and locates evidence indicating that big business did not, on balance, support Hitler's political program More »
56. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
By Adam Tooze
An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial new book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision- ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own ... More »
57. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
"A remarkable-and singularly chilling-glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."-Newsweek Christopher R. Browning's shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews-now with a ... More »
58. Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939
A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of ... More »
59. The Destruction of the European Jews
By Raul Hilberg
Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews was the first major scholarly work on the subject of the Jewish Holocaust. Until the book appeared little information about the holocaust had reached the wider public and the text largely began a whole field of study In that area. More »
60. The Order of Terror
During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. In this pioneering book, the renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme ... More »
61. The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration
Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy ... More »
62. Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany, 1900 - 1945
Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis systematically murdered as many as 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled people whom they stigmatised as 'life unworthy of life'. This book is the first full-scale study in English of this complex and covert series of operations known as the 'euthanasia' programme. ... More »
63. Hitler, Germans, and the Jewish Question
This book probes the background of the ultimately unexplainable evil of our century, the deliberate and unprovoked murder of millions of European Jews and goes on to explore German reactions to that evil. Depicting the emergence in Welmar Germany of a new type of extreme anti-Semite, of which ... More »
64. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor ... More »
65. Interpretations of the Two Germanies, 1945-1990
The two Germanies, arising from the unpromising ashes of defeated Nazi Germany, came to represent opposing models of state and society. The Federal Republic established itself as a remarkably stable democracy and successful social market economy: the German Democratic Republic developed an apparently exemplary form of 'actually existing ... More »
66. Coming of Age: German Foreign Policy since 1945
In this authoritative book, the only work to cover the full sweep of German foreign policy since the end of World War II, noted scholar Helga Haftendorn explores Germany's remarkable recovery from wartime defeat and destruction. Offspring of the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany and the ... More »
67. Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification
Germany Divided remains one of the most thought-provoking and comprehensive interpretations of the forty-year relationship between East and West Germany and of the problems of contemporary German unity. In this politically controversial and analytically sophisticated account, A. James McAdams dissects the complex process by which East and West ... More »
68. Germany 1945: From War to Peace
1945 was the most pivotal year in Germany's modern history. As World War II drew to a devastating and violent close, the German people were confronted simultaneously with making sense of the horrors just passed and finding the strength and hope to move forward and rebuild. Richard Bessel ... More »
69. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation
By George J. Annas; Michael A. Grodin
The atrocities committed by Nazi physicians and researchers during World War II prompted the development of the Nuremberg Code to define the ethics of modern medical experimentation utilizing human subjects. Since its enunciation, the Code has been viewed as one of the cornerstones of modern bioethical thought. The ... More »
70. The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans
"This book will provoke intellectually, ideologically, and emotionally loaded responses in the U.S., Germany, and Israel. Barnouw's critique of the 'enduringly narrow post-Holocaust perspective on German guilt and the ensuing fixation on German remorse' questions taboos that the political and cultural elites in those three countries would rather ... More »
71. Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones 1945-1955
After years of relative neglect, the reconstruction of post-war Germany has recently become a major research focus for historians. The contributors to this volume were among the first to evaluate the archives relevant to their topic and are hence able to present many fresh insights into Allied occupation ... More »
72. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles Maier writes that the historians' controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never ... More »
73. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany
By Ute Poiger
In the two decades after World War II, Germans on both sides of the iron curtain fought vehemently over American cultural imports. Uta G. Poiger traces how westerns, jeans, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and stars like Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both Germanies, who eagerly ... More »
74. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past
Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, ... More »
75. The making of German democracy: West Germany during the Adenauer era, 1945-65
This is the first English language source reader that deals with post-war (West) Germany. Over 160 commented sources describe the political, social and economic developments that changed Germany from the abyss of Nazism into a prosperous ally of the West and into one of the driving forces of ... More »
76. West Germany and the Global Sixties
The anti-authoritarian revolt of the 1960s and 1970s was a watershed in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The rebellion of the so-called '68ers' - against cultural conformity and the ideological imperatives of the Cold War; against the American war in Vietnam; in favor of a ... More »
77. Politics of Security: British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945-1970
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. How did European societies experience the Cold ... More »
78. Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany
This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single-nation studies, Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyze movements in two countries--Italy and Germany--from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through extensive use of ... More »
79. Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770-1968
By Mark Roseman
This is the first English-language collection of essays on modern German history with a generational theme. It analyzes the origins and impact of generation conflict from the eighteenth century to the 1960s student revolts. It adds to our understanding of generations as historical phenomena and elucidates why so ... More »
80. The Bonn Republic West German Democracy, 1945-1990
Here is an authoritative account, by one of Britain's leading Germanists, of the political history of the West German state from its birth amid postwar devastation and defeat through to reunification after the fall of the Soviet Empire, when she was once again the leading power of continental ... More »
81. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany
Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that ... More »
82. German Politics 1945-1995
By Peter Pulzer
With the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the unification of 1990 a new German state emerged-the fifth constitutional upheaval and the fourth change of frontiers in this century. This book aims to introduce the reader to the legacy that present-day Germany has inherited from both ... More »
83. The German Democratic Republic
A clear, concise and thought-provoking introduction to the history of East Germany - its development and downfall - which engages. Peter Grieder offers a thought-provoking introduction to the history of East Germany which engages critically with key debates and advances fresh interpretations. Arguing that the German Democratic Republic ... More »
84. Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the GDR, 1945-1989
Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political and economic structures of the former German Democratic Republic are largely understood, yet many questions remain. What actually motivated the East Germans themselves? What common goals and values kept GDR society going and, until its unexpected collapse ... More »
85. Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic
Why did the German Democratic Republic last for so long--longer, in fact, than the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich combined? This book looks at various political, social, and economic conflicts at the grass roots of the GDR in an attempt to answer this question and account for ... More »
86. Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots: The Transformation of East Germany, 1945-65
By Corey Ross
In the two decades following the defeat of the Third Reich, East Germany was transformed from a war-ravaged occupation zone into an apparent model of Soviet style socialism. Based on extensive archival research, this book explores the building of socialism in East Germany not from the standard perspective ... More »
87. The Fall of the GDR
By David Childs
The book charts the dramatic months leading to one of the most profound changes of the 20th century, the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the restoration of German unity in 1990. The author analyses the nature of Communist rule in the GDR over 40 years, ... More »
88. Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia
By Paul Cooke
When the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanies were reunited, culture was held up to be one of the keys to national unity. Ironically, however, Cooke argues it is the realm of culture that, at times, has most clearly demonstrated the continued divisions between East and ... More »
89. Germany as a Civilian Power?
By Sebastian Harnisch; Hanns Maull
The depiction of Germany as a "civilian power", committed to non-military means, has deeply influenced analysis of German foreign policy since the last world war. The term "civilian power" evokes the singularity of the pre-unification West German state which defined its foreign policy in reaction to the violent ... More »
90. Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History
By Fritz Stern
This collection of essays by eminent historian Fritz Stern ponders the monumental promise and catastrophe of twentieth-century German history. It is now reissued with a new introduction by the author. More »
91. Within Walls: Private Life In The German Democratic Republic
By Paul Betts
Private life in the German Democratic Republic (Gdr) is often seen as having been virtually non-existent, simply another East German commodity forever in short supply. In part this had to do with the common perception that private life and state socialism were at odds by definition, to the ... More »
92. Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany : Brandenburg, 1945-1948
In his study of Brandenburg, Germany, Timothy Vogt directly challenges both the "antifascist" paradigm employed by East German historians and the "sovietization" interpretive model that has dominated western studies. He argues that Soviet denazification was neither an effective purge of society nor part of a methodical "sovietization" of ... More »
93. Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power
Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. This new history rejects traditional, top-down approaches to Cold War politics, ... More »
94. Popular Protest in East Germany, 1945-1989
By Gareth Dale
An incisive new study of dissent and protest in the German Democratic Republic, focusing on the upheaval of 1989-1990. The author, an active participant both in the 'Citizens' Movement' and in the street protests of that year, draws upon a vast array of sources including interviews, documents ... More »
95. Inventing a Socialist Nation
Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it. Jan Palmowski argues that it was hard ... More »
96. Antisemitism and Xenophobia in Germany after Unification
By Hermann Kurthen; Werner Bergmann; Rainer Erb
Since unification, Germany has experienced profound changes, including the reawakening of xenophobic hate crime, anti-Semitic incidents, and racist violence. This book presents the most recent research conducted by a team of American and German experts in political science, sociology, mass communication, and history. They analyze the degree of ... More »
97. The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR
The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR's 'new' society was deliberately conceived as a ... More »
98. The Fading Miracle: Four Decades of Market Economy in Germany
By Herbert Giersch; Karl-Heinz Paque; Holger Schmieding
This book provides a lucid account of economic policy in West Germany from the late 1940s up to the present, including the new challenges presented by the unification of the two German states in 1990. The authors describe and evaluate the major policy controversies and decisions, and place ... More »
99. Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall
The changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 were particularly dramatic for East Germans. With the German Democratic Republic effectively taken over by West Germany in the reunification process, nothing in their lives was immune from change and upheaval: from the way they ... More »
100. Germany: Beyond the Stable State
By Wolfgang Streeck; Herbert Kitschelt
From the 1960s to the 1980s, observers gave the name "Model Germany" to the Federal Republic. They saw in Germany a political-economic "model" that was able to weather many economic challenges. "Model Germany" permitted political competition, while coordinating public policy among interest associations and private businesses so that ... More »
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