A groundbreaking exploration of disability in Germany, from the Weimar Republic to present-day reunified Germany

This text explores Germany's role in the two world wars and the Cold War to analyze the food economy of the twentieth century. It argues that controlling food supply and determining how and what people ate shaped the course of these three wars

Tracking the turbulent course of 20th century German history. Around 1900, Germany was economically the strongest country on the European continent, a leader in the sciences, with a flourishing culture and a progressive social model. One hundred years later, it is presented as being so once again. But, in between, there were two world wars, a failed democracy, the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust, and the 40-year division of the country. How did Germany go from the economic and cultural bloom of the country around the turn of the century to mass crimes during the Nazi dictatorship? And how did the Germans emerge from this apocalypse over the next sixty years? Ulrich Herbert tackles here the questions of both the collapse in the first half of the century and the development from a post-fascist, ruined society to one of the most stable liberal democracies and one of the richest countries in the world in the latter half. To explain these trajectories, Herbert's analysis brings together wars and terror, utopia and politics, capitalism and the welfare state, socialism and liberal democratic society, gender and generations, culture and lifestyles, European integration and globalization.

Germans of the generation born just before the outbreak of World War I lived through a tumultuous and dramatic century. This book tells the story of their lives and, in so doing, offers a new history of twentieth-century Germany, as experienced and made by ordinary human beings.On the basis of sixty-two oral-history interviews, this book shows how this generation was shaped psychologically by a series of historically engendered losses over the course of the century. In response, this generation turned to the collective to repair the losses it had suffered, most fatefully to the community of the "Volk" during the Third Reich, a racial collective to which this generation was passionately committed and which was at the heart of National Socialism and its popular appeal.

This is the first book to examine this crucial relationship between politics and culture in Germany, not only during the Nazi and Cold War eras but in periods when the effects are less obvious.

Germany in the 20th century endured two world wars, a failed democracy, Hitler's dictatorship, the Holocaust, and a country divided for 40 years after World War II. But it has also boasted a strong welfare state, affluence, liberalization and globalization, a successful democracy, and the longest period of peace in European history. A History of Twentieth-Century Germany provides a survey of German history during a century of extremes. Ulrich Herbert sees German history in the 20th century as determined by two contradictory perspectives. On one hand, there are the world wars and great catastrophes that divide the country's history into two parts-before and after 1945. Germany is the birthplace of radical ideologies of the left and right and the only country in which each ideology became the foundation of government. This pattern left its stamp on both the first and second halves of the century. On the other hand, the rise of modern industrial society led to decades of conflict over the social and political order regardless of which political system was in force. Considering these contradictory developments, Herbert tackles the questions of both the collapse in the first half of the century and the development from a post-fascist, ruined society to one of the most stable liberal democracies in the world in the latter half. Herbert's analysis brings together wars and terror, utopia and politics, capitalism and the welfare state, socialism and liberal democratic society, gender and generations, culture and lifestyles, European integration and globalization. The resulting book sets a standard by which historians of the period will be measured in the future.

This book provides an overview of twentieth-century German art, focusing on some of the period's key works. In Peter Chametzky's innovative approach, these works become representatives rather than representations of twentieth-century history. Chametzky draws on both scholarly and popular sources to demonstrate how the works (and in some cases, the artists themselves) interacted with, and even enacted, historical events, processes, and ideas.--[book jacket].