Excerpt from Men Around the Kaiser: The Makers of Modern Germany William II., German Emperor and King of Prussia, is about to commemorate his Silver Jubilee. Twenty-five years of eventful sovereignty have brought his Empire to the pinnacle of national greatness. Under his dynamic leadership the Fatherland has advanced to front rank in the peaceful arts of commerce and trade, made herself the world's first military power, and become Britain's formidable rival for the mastery of the sea. No reign, medieval or modern, records a more inspiring story of a people's vault to affluence and might. Wondrous and eloquent are the statistical revelations of Germany's bounding growth in population, of Imperial Berlin's rise to metropolitan splendour, of the Empire's colossal foreign trade, of the amazing expansion of national wealth, of the development of the merchant marine, of the transformation of the Navy from a fleet of frigates into an Armada of Dreadnoughts, of triumphs countless in the realms of science, art and industry, which combine to make the German name synonymous with progress and power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Hailed as one of the most important works on the Hitler period, this is an “astonishing, compelling, and unnerving” portrait of life in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1944—from a man who nearly shot Hitler himself (The New Yorker) Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck, the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to approaching defeat; their travesty of traditional folkways in the name of the Volk; and the author’s own missed opportunity to shoot Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed it, “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period,” but a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing in a depraved world.