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This book aims to provide a clear and informative guide to the twists and turns of German history from the early middle ages to the present day. The multi-faceted, problematic history of the German lands has provoked a wide range of debates and differences of interpretation. Dr Fulbrook provides a crisp synthesis of a vast array of historical material, and explores the interrelationships between social, political and cultural factors in the light of scholarly controversies. German history is renowned for it peculiarities and paradoxes. The land of Luther, Bach and Goethe is also the land of Hitler and the Holocaust. The 'land in the centre of Europe' played a pivotal role in the European balance of power, yet never found a satisfactory identity or even stable boundaries. For centuries, the loose framework of the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation', dominated by the Austrian Habsburgs, permitted a myriad of social and political forms and cultural traditions. With late, rapid industrialisation and unification of a Prussian-dominated 'small' Germany, domestic tensions contributed to the unleashing century, the status of a divided Germany echoed, refracted, and had implications for wider developments and divisions across the world. Only recently has the breaching of the Berlin Wall and the breathtaking rapid unification of the two germanies marked a dramatic new beginning in German history and the international order. This is the only single-volume history of Germany in English which offers a broad, general coverage of the main themes and topics. It will therefore be essential reading for all students of German, European studies and history, and will be a helpful guide to general readers, members of the business community and travellers to Germany....
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The third edition of A History of Germany traces the dramatic social, cultural, and political tensions in Germany since 1918. - Offers a persuasive interpretation of the dynamics of twentieth-century German history
- Treats German history from 1918-2008 from the perspective of division and reunification, covering East and West German history in equal depth
- Covers the self-destructive Weimar Republic, the extremes of genocide and military aggression in the Nazi era, the division of the nation in the Cold War, and the collapse of communist East Germany and unification in 1990
- New edition includes updates throughout, especially covering the Nazi period and the Holocaust; a new chapter on Germany since the 1990s; and a substantially revised and updated bibliography
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What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.”Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler’s Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives.Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history. ...
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The Berlin Wall, for many people, epitomizes the communist German Democratic Republic, founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany; other central features of life in the GDR appear to be under the threat of repression by Soviet tanks and surveillance by the secret security police, the Stasi. But is repression and surveillance really all there is to the GDR s history? How did people come to terms with their situation and make new lives behind the Wall? When the social history of the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s is explored, new patterns become evident. In a period characterised by consumer socialism, international recognition and détente, a fragile stability emerged. Increased participation in the micro-structures of power, and conformity to the unwritten rules of an increasingly predictable system, suggest accommodation to dominant norms and conceptions. Contributors explore the ways in which lower-level functionaries and people at the grass roots contributed to the formation and transformation of the GDR from industry and agriculture, through popular sport and cultural life, to the passage of generations and varieties of social experience. The volume thus presents a more complex approach to the history of East Germany during its previously under-researched middle decades and sheds new light on the phenomenon of nostalgic memories since unification. And through the framework of the theoretical concept of normalisation , the book situates the history of the GDR within the wider context of post-war western and eastern European history....
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