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Title details for Broken Lives by Konrad H. Jarausch - Available

Broken Lives

How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century

by Konrad H. Jarausch
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The gripping stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition—but also recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation
Broken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did.
Drawing on six dozen memoirs by the generation of Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Written decades after the events, these testimonies, many of them unpublished, look back on the mistakes of young people caught up in the Nazi movement. In many, early enthusiasm turns to deep disillusionment as the price of complicity with a brutal dictatorship—fighting at the front, aerial bombardment at home, murder in the concentration camps—becomes clear.
Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives reveals the intimate human details of historical events and offers new insights about persistent questions. Why did so many Germans support Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi inhumanity? How did they finally distance themselves from this racist dictatorship and come to embrace human rights? Jarausch argues that this generation's focus on its own suffering, often maligned by historians, ultimately led to a more critical understanding of national identity—one that helped transform Germany from a military aggressor into a pillar of European democracy.
The result is a powerful account of the everyday experiences and troubling memories of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and out of the abyss of a dark century.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 12, 2018

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9781400889334

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781400889334
      • File size: 7843 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781400889334
      • File size: 6267 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      May 1, 2018
      A revealing study of the lives of "ordinary Germans" under the Third Reich and its aftermath.Historian Jarausch (European Civilization/Univ. of North Carolina; Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, 2015, etc.) recounts the experiences of Germans born in the 1920s--old enough to have participated in some way in the polity of the Third Reich and to have played a part in the reconstruction of Germany and subsequent "economic miracle" in the West. The latter moment, writes the author, "created an expectation of continual material improvement," and wealth and its pursuit, coupled with memories of the nightmare years, served as powerful engines to create the social democracy that has prevailed in Germany (the West, at least) for 70 years. That comfort, however, was born in terror. Jarausch charts the changing attitudes of early-20th-century Germans toward ideas of nationhood. Where their predecessors were mostly not attuned to questions of genealogy and in many cases, among the proletariat, scarcely remembered their grandparents' names ("for the struggle for existence prevented the keeping of records"), Germans under the Third Reich were forced to conform to ideas of racial purity and prove it lest they be destroyed. On that note, much of the narrative concerns the machinery of annihilation, but it also turns on some surprising moments, such as the decision on the part of some Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to remain in Germany even though they "had ample reason to emigrate." That was a daring choice, it seems, inasmuch as the author's account also implicates the majority of contemporary Germans: "More ordinary Germans were involved in the Holocaust than apologists admit, but at the same time fewer participated than some critics claim." In other words, a silent majority gave tacit consent.A provocative addition to a vast literature: Jarausch's history complicates our understanding of German society during the early decades of the 20th century.

      COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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