Germany 1945: From War to Peace - Softcover

Bessel, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060540370 ISBN 13: 9780060540371

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2010

Synopsis

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 offers a provocative portrait of Germany's emergence from catastrophe, and he astutely portrays the defeated nation's own sense of victimhood after the war, despite the crimes it had perpetrated. Authoritative and dramatic, Germany 1945 is groundbreaking history that brilliantly explores the destruction and remarkable rebirth of Germany at the end of World War II. Ultimately, it is a success story; a story of life after death.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Bessel is a professor of twentieth-century history at the University of York and the author of Nazism and War.

From The New Yorker:

In the months after the fall of the Third Reich, Bessel writes, “the entire country seemed to be waiting for a train.” Bessel does an excellent job of evoking the blasted landscape of a conquered Germany—the homelessness and the hunger, the rubble and the mass rape. (Among the book’s fascinating details: Allied soldiers were told to look for insurgents with “belts filled with explosives,” who never emerged; a common postwar crime was bigamy.) There was also, belatedly, disillusionment. Nazi leaders had sacrificed or abandoned their own civilians, underscoring the “obvious bankruptcy of National Socialism.” Germans dissolved into pools of self-pity—which, remarkably, helped lay the foundation (at least in the West) for a democratic and pacifist state. Bessel fully recognizes the repugnance that the Germans’ sense of victimhood and their amnesia about their culpability provokes; and yet, he notes, their eagerness to put Nazism behind them and make “a fundamental break with the past” was “no bad thing.”
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0060540370
• ISBN 13: 9780060540371
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560