Explore the rich history and mysteries of this Preserve America Community through the eyes of the people who live there! German Village's iconic homes, bustling businesses and other beloved sites harbor fascinating stories. Did you know that German Village's Recreation Park, now gone, is thought to have had the first baseball concession stand? Or that the four-story Schwartz Castle was the site of two murders? Or that the popular restaurant Engine House No. 5 closed its doors after the mysterious disappearance of its owners in the Bermuda Triangle? Longtime resident and tour guide John M. Clark goes behind the bricks of more than seventy German Village properties to explore the places and people who made the Old South End into a Columbus treasure.

Walk the brick-paved streets of German Village, one of the capital city's most vital and historically prominent neighborhoods. Beginning as a haven for German settlers in the mid-1800s, the neighborhood, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is renowned for its preserved architecture and its hearty citizenry, such as Max Visocnik, who gave us Max & Erma's in 1958, and the Schmidt family, proprietors of the famed Schmidt's Restaurant and Sausage Haus--a German Village institution for more than one hundred years. Join the German Village Society's Jody Graichen as she recounts the struggles of the German immigrants, the rise of the neighborhood and the efforts to preserve a Columbus jewel in this collection of columns previously published in ThisWeek Community Newspapers, with a foreword by Dr. Wayne P. Lawson, The Ohio State University professor and director emeritus of the Ohio Arts Council.

Many scholars have tried to assess Adolf Hitler's influence on the German people, usually focusing on university towns and industrial communities, most of them predominately Protestant or religiously mixed. This work by Walter Rinderle and Bernard Norling, however, deals with the impact of the Nazis on Oberschopfheim, a small, rural, overwhelmingly Catholic village in Baden-Wuerttemberg in southwestern Germany. This incisively written book raises fundamental questions about the nature of the Third Reich. The authors portray the Nazi regime as considerably less "totalitarian" than is commonly assumed, hardly an exemplar of the efficiency for which Germany is known, and neither revered nor condemned by most of its inhabitants. The authors suggest that Oberschopfheim merely accepted Nazi rule with the same resignation with which so many ordinary people have regarded their governments throughout history. Based on village and county records and on the direct testimony of Oberschopfheimers, this book will interest anyone concerned with contemporary Germany as a growing economic power and will appeal to the descendants of German immigrants to the United States because of its depiction of several generations of life in a German village.