Showing results for "F" in Germany

The Decline of the West - Volume 1 published in 1917, Volume 2 in 1922 - has exercised and challenged opinion ever since. It was a huge undertaking by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), formerly an unpublished historian and philosopher who set out to radically reconsider history - the rise and fall of world civilisations and their cultures. His primary view was to reject the established Eurocentric paradigm (ancient/classical, Medieval - and, following the Renaissance - modern) and to take a totally new perspective.

Before 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France—all without destroying itself in the process?

Der Parlamentarische Rat mit Konrad Adenauer als Präsident wurde am 1. September 1948 einberufen, um eine Verfassung für die entstehende Bundesrepublik Deutschland zu schaffen. Adenauers Rolle wurde von Anfang an kontrovers beurteilt und er wurde noch lange als "Bundeskanzler der Alliierten" diskreditiert. Doch Adenauer sah seine Aufgabe darin, eine Atmosphäre zu schaffen, in der Verfassungsschöpfung unter Besatzungsherrschaft überhaupt erst möglich wurde, indem er die Ziele der deutschen Parteien mit den Interessen der Alliierten in Einklang brachte.

While our understanding of the Holocaust is well developed, we know little about everyday life in Nazi Germany. In this vivid and important study, Roger Moorhouse portrays the German experience of the Second World War from the viewpoint of the capital's streets and homes, raising issues of consent and dissent, morality and authority and charting the violent humbling of a once-proud metropolis.

Following the end of the Second World War, between 1945 and 1949, British forces occupied the northern part of what would become West Germany. Here, Daniel Cowling presents a political and military history of this occupation, but also explores the experiences of the thousands of British men and women who were tasked with building a democracy out of the ruins of Hitler's Germany. Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans offers telling insights into Britain's experience of the Second World War and the Cold War, and sheds light on the development of Britain's relationship with Europe since 1945.

Steven Spielberg's Oscar winning film Schindler's List turned the hero Oscar Schindler into a household name, telling the story of the man who saved countless thousands from Nazi Germany's concentration camps. Few, however, have heard of Felix Kersten, the rotund, avuncular, and reluctant Finn who was pulled into the Third Reich's corridors of power as Heinrich Himmler's personal physician, seemingly the only person who could cure the chief architect of the Holocaust of his crippling stomach pains.

In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding travelled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a house by a lake. It had been a holiday home for her family, that she had been forced to leave as the Nazis swept to power. As he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived, he realised that this house had witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation.

Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet - and one of history's greatest conspiracies is born. Harro Schulze-Boysen had already shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascists that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld.