European Past: Memoirs 1905-1945 - Hardcover

Gilbert, Felix

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393025527 ISBN 13: 9780393025521

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1988

Synopsis

Born and raised in Germany, a firsthand observer of that country until Nazism emerged in the 1930s recounts his childhood, the nation's changing political regimes, and his reactions on returning to Germany years later

About this title

About the Author

Felix Gilbert, late of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was the first recipient of the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1985.

From Publishers Weekly

Gilbert refutes the notion, still prevalent among certain Germans, that Hitler's regime would have been acceptable were it not for his Jewish policy. In this pungent if impersonal memoir, the noted historian, raised in a family of Jews who converted to Christianity, looks back through a glass darkly. He recalls Berlin of the 1920s; turbulent years of revolution and civil war that hardly touched his bourgeois world. The lengthening shadow cast by Nazism is evoked through a series of letters reprinted here. Bleak, atmospheric chapters cover his exile in London where he arrived in 1933 and remained during the later German bombings. As an American officer in 1945, Gilbert was a member of the mission that determined the boundary lines that still divide Germany today. In measured prose he weighs the past against the present, linking his personal sense of dislocation to the ruptures of history.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0393025527
• ISBN 13: 9780393025521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 229