464 results for "History"
Liberalism and the origins of European social theory
The Weimar Republic, 1919-1933
Surviving the Americans: the continued struggle of the Jews after liberation
Hilliard (born Robert Hilliard Levine), a former U.S. soldier in occupied Germany, describes the continuing genocide-by-neglect of Holocaust survivors. The latter had little or no food, clothing, or medicine; they were interned behind barbed wire, as if they were still being held by the Nazis. Their pain was increased by the favoritism shown by the U.S. Military Government toward former Nazis and their sympathizers. Letters sent by the author and by his friend, Edward Herman, came to the attention of Earl G. Harrison, whom President Truman sent to investigate the situation. Truman ordered General Eisenhower to change American policy, and this was done. Includes a description of events at a hospital in St. Ottilien where American antisemitism was rampant, until the reactions of the DPs and of American Jews helped pressure the Americans to improve the situation.
Solidarity and Treason Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940
Lisa Fittko's Escape through the Pyrenees (Northwestern, 1991) told the extraordinary true tale of her life as an "enemy alien" in France before and after the Nazi invasion of 1940, when she and her husband smuggled small groups of refugees to safety along a tortuous route through the mountains. Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 is Fittko's equally gripping memoir of the preceding years in the underground and exile. The volume opens with Hitler's.
The Holocaust: the fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945
Twenty years of research by the author have made this a most comprehensive work on the Holocaust detailing many aspects of the tragedy often overlooked in other sources. events related to the period in even the most remote parts...
Three faces of antisemitism: right, left and Islamist
"Three Faces of Antisemitism examines the three primary forms of antisemitism as they emerged in modern and contemporary Germany, and then in other countries. Essays draw on the author's historical scholarship over the years on the form antisemitism assumed on the far right in Weimar and Nazi Germany, in the Communist regime in East Germany, and in the West German radical left, and in Islamist organizations during World War II and the Holocaust, and afterwards in the Middle East. The resurgence of antisemitism since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has origins in the ideas, events and circumstances in Europe and the Middle East in the half century from the 1920s to the 1970s. This book covers the period since 1945 when neo-Nazism was on the fringes of Western and world politics, and the persistence of antisemitism took place primarily when its leftist and Islamist forms combined antisemitism with anti-Zionism in attacks on the state of Israel. The collection includes recent essays of commentary that draw attention to the simultaneous presence of antisemitism's three faces. While scholarship on the antisemitism of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust remains crucial, the scholarly, intellectual and political effort to fight antisemitism in our times requires examination of antisemitism's leftist and Islamist forms as well. This book will be of interest to scholars researching antisemitism, racism, conspiracy theories, the far right, the far left, and Islamism"--
From Frankism to Jacobinism The Life of Moses Dobrushka
In this book world-renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) describes the three extraordinary lives of Moses Dobrushka. Beginning his life as a Bohemian Jew in the antinomian cult of Sabbataean Frankism, Dobrushka first re-invented himself as the Catholic Austrian nobleman Franz Thomas von Schönfeld, before abandoning this identity to become the Jacobin "Junius Frey." On the 5TH of April 1794, Dobrushka was guillotined alongside such luminaries of the French Revolution as Danton and Desmoulins. In the course of this biography, the author explains critical historical links between revolutionary liberalism, Freemasonry, and Judaism.
The Nazi and the barber
Berlin was still a heap of ruins. ... One day they would rebuild the city again. I could see the day coming. And the rest of Germany, too. Yes. They would rebuild everything again. All Germany. And then ... yes ... perhaps they will bring back the Fuhrer from heaven. The Nazi and The Barber is the famous story about the Nazi mass-murderer Max Schulz who after the war hides himself by assuming a Jewish identity. You will never forget this book. Written by the well-known German-Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath. "
Icon of evil: Hitler's Mufti and the rise of radical Islam
A political biography of Haj Amin al-Husaini (1895-1974), the Palestinian Arab nationalist leader and one-time Mufti of Jerusalem. Husaini adopted aggressive antisemitism in his youth, while studying in Cairo. He bears responsibility for the bloody anti-Jewish riots in the Land of Israel in 1920, 1921, and 1929, and was an instigator of the Arab revolt of 1936-39 in the country. In the 1930s he was close with Nazi leaders, with whom he shared extreme antisemitism and the goal of annihilation of the Jews. In the 1940s Husaini was instrumental in the establishment of pro-Nazi Muslim military formations in Europe, among them the Bosnian SS division "Handschar", which killed 12,600 Bosnian Jews. Argues that Husaini's legacy is alive in the modern Muslim world. He was the link between World War II antisemitism and the modern Islamic one, as well as a founding father of radical Islamic antisemitism. Dwells on the latter, which adopted from the West belief in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", blood libels, Holocaust denial, etc.
Necessary angels: tradition and modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem
In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem, it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Streetin Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. --
Bismarck 1927
1927. The story of a fighter born Otto Eduard Leopold Von Bismarck- Schohausen, also known as the Iron Chancellor. The aim of this book is to show the portrait of a victorious and errant warrior. Bismarck is depicted as a character filled with pride, courage and hatred, the basic elements from which his actions resulted. This is a fascinating story on this Prussian statesman and first chancellor of the German Empire.
Rahel Varnhagen: the life of a Jewish woman
"Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cutural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone who confronted and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany with unusual determination. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, was, Hannah Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive... and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life--having been born a Jewess--this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Hannah Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity.""--
The passenger: a novel
"Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany"--
Sieg Heil an Illustrated History: Germany from Bismark to Hitler
This book is an illustrated history of Germany from Bismarck to Hitler.
The German War A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945
A groundbreaking history of what drove the Germans to fight -- and keep fighting -- for a lost cause in World War II In The German War , acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of firsthand testimony -- personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence -- to explore how the German people experienced the Second World War. When war broke out in September 1939, it was deeply unpopular in Germany. Yet without the active participation and commitment of the German people, it could not have continued for almost six years. What, then, was the war the Germans thought they were fighting? How did the changing course of the conflict -- the victories of the Blitzkrieg , the first defeats in the east, the bombing of German cities -- alter their views and expectations? And when did Germans first realize they were fighting a genocidal war? Told from the perspective of those who lived through it -- soldiers, schoolteachers, and housewives; Nazis, Christians, and Jews -- this masterful historical narrative sheds fresh and disturbing light on the beliefs and fears of a people who embarked on and fought to the end a brutal war of conquest and genocide.
Jewish reactions to the Holocaust
A revised version of two courses of lectures delivered as part of the Broadcast University series of Israel Army Radio. Discusses the struggle of Jews for survival under Nazi rule, and attempts at aid and rescue by Jews in the Western democracies and Palestine, by foreign governments, and by "Righteous Gentiles". Emphasizes that the Nazis decided to murder all the Jews only in autumn 1940; until then no one could have foreseen the Holocaust to come. When the first reports of mass murder were received, they met with disbelief on the part of most Jews as well as non-Jews. This lack of awareness explains why the potential victims were slow to escape or resist; and, in conjunction with the prevalence of antisemitism and the political impotence of world and Palestinian Jewry, it also explains the failure of the outside world to come to their rescue. Among the topics covered are the search for countries of asylum; the Transfer Agreement; illegal immigration to Palestine; the ghettos and the Judenräte; the resistance groups and armed uprisings in the ghettos; Jewish partisans; underground rescue groups; negotiations with SS functionaries for Jewish lives; and the British Foreign Office's blocking of rescue proposals.
The house by the lake
Thomas Harding adapts his adult memoir of the same name for younger readers, tracing the shadow of war as it falls across a one-story cottage and the people who share it.
Imperfect justice: looted assets, slave labor, and the unfinished business of World War II
A personal memoir by Eizenstat, who served under President Carter in several capacities, including secretary of state on Holocaust issues, relating his experiences in negotiations with governments of and/or business representatives from Switzerland, Austria, France, and Germany to pay compensation to Holocaust victims or their heirs for looted property and for suffering (slave labor) under the Nazis. Swiss gold, stolen art, and other stolen property of individuals and communities were finally repaid through agreements reached or encouraged by U.S. class-action suits. In addition to the "imperfect justice" of financial recompense, notes the moral success of furthering the truth and inspiring international efforts at Holocaust education. also discusses the author's role in helping establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
My German question: growing up in Nazi Berlin
A renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, antireligious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933-1939.