The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.

Table of contents

"The Last Revolutionaries" tells a story of unwavering political devotion: it follows the lives of German communists across the tumultuous twentieth century. Before 1945, German communists were political outcasts in the Weimar Republic and courageous resisters in Nazi Germany; they also suffered Stalin's Great Purges and struggled through emigration in countries hostile to communism. After World War II, they became leaders of East Germany, where they ran a dictatorial regime until they were swept out of power by the people's revolution of 1989. In a compelling collective biography, Catherine Epstein conveys the hopes, fears, dreams, and disappointments of a generation that lived their political commitment. Focusing on eight individuals, "The Last Revolutionaries" shows how political ideology drove people's lives. Some of these communists, including the East German leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, enjoyed great personal success. But others, including the purge victims Franz Dahlem and Karl Schirdewan, experienced devastating losses. And, as the book demonstrates, female and Jewish communists faced their own sets of difficulties in the movement to which they had given their all. Drawing on previously inaccessible sources as well as extensive personal interviews, Epstein offers an unparalleled portrait of the most enduring and influential generation of Central European communists. In the service of their party, these communists experienced solidarity and betrayal, power and persecution, sacrifice and reward, triumph and defeat. At once sordid and poignant, theirs is the story of European communism--from the heroic excitement of its youth, to the bureaucratic authoritarianism of its middle age, to the sorry debacle of its death.

A 1998 Los Angeles Times Book of the Year: the "vivid and moving" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) composite portrait of the historic migration of German-speaking refugees from Hitler. Hitler's Exiles is at once a moving human document and a new classic of the literature of exile. Hailed by David Rieff as "fascinating, important, and heart-rending," Hitler's Exiles features nearly fifty first-person accounts of the flight from Hitler's Germany to America, many published for the first time. From forgotten archives and obscure published sources, Hitler's Exiles recaptures the unknown voices of that perilous time by focusing on the ordinary people who underwent a most extraordinary voyage. Anderson also includes little-known writings by such major figures as Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht. A new preface written for this paperback edition discusses the outpouring of emotion and memory the book has generated, and includes several moving letters from relatives of those in the book.

A magisterial history of the artists and writers who left Weimar when the Nazis came to power In 1933 thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They were, in the words of Heinrich Mann, “the best of Germany,” refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality. Exiled across the world, they continued the fight against Nazism in prose, poetry, painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to their return to a ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories. The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Hanns Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others provides a counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.

BETWEEN 1933 AND 1945 MEMBERS OF THREE GROUPS—THE Nazi fascists, Inner Emigration, and Exiles—fought with equal fervor over who could definitively claim to represent the authentically “great German culture,” as it was culture that imparted real value to both the state and the individual. But when authorities made pronouncements about “culture” were they really talking about high art? This book analyzes the highly complex interconnections among the cultural-political concepts of these various ideological groups and asks why the most artistically ambitious art forms were viewed as politically important by all cultured (or even semi-cultured) Germans in the period from 1933 to 1945, with their ownership the object of a bitter struggle between key figures in the Nazi fascist regime, representatives of Inner Emigration, and Germans driven out of the Third Reich.