Both works in this volume - a play by Carl Zuckmayer (1896-1977) and an unusual contemporary study of Nazi Germany by Sebastian Haffner (1907-99) - bear testimony to the disturbing events that were to change German history in the aftermath of World War I. The abridged translation of The Devil's General, which was approved by Zuckmayer himself, is about a World War I flier who commits suicide as he comes to realize the unintended havoc he has wrought in his obsession to fly. Sebastian Haffner, whose real name was Raimund Pretzel (which was changed with the publication of Germany: Jekyll and Hyde), remained a controversial journalist all his life, working for both left-wing and right-wing journals. The work excerpted here was written in 1940 when Haffner, reared in a liberal tradition, was in a British detention camp as an enemy alien.

As the Second World War neared its conclusion, Germany was a nation reduced to rubble: 3.6 million German homes had been destroyed leaving 7.5 million people homeless; an apocalyptic landscape of flattened cities and desolate wastelands. In May 1945 Germany surrendered, and Britain, America, Soviet Russia and France set about rebuilding their zones of occupation. Most urgent for the Allies in this divided, defeated country were food, water and sanitation, but from the start they were anxious to provide for the minds as well as the physical needs of the German people. Reconstruction was to be cultural as well as practical: denazification and re-education would be key to future peace and the arts crucial in modelling alternative, less militaristic, ways of life. Germany was to be reborn; its citizens as well as its cities were to be reconstructed; the mindset of the Third Reich was to be obliterated. When, later that year, twenty-two senior Nazis were put in the dock at Nuremberg, writers and artists including Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, John Dos Passos and Laura Knight were there to tell the world about a trial intended to ensure that tyrannous dictators could never again enslave the people of Europe. And over the next four years, many of the foremost writers and filmmakers of their generation were dispatched by Britain and America to help rebuild the country their governments had spent years bombing. Among them, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Marlene Dietrich, George Orwell, Lee Miller, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Billy Wilder and Humphrey Jennings. The Bitter Taste of Victory traces the experiences of these figures and through their individual stories offers an entirely fresh view of post-war Europe. Never before told, this is a brilliant, important and utterly mesmerising history of cultural transformation.

From its creation in 1950, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry for State Security closely monitored its nation’s citizens. Known as the Staatssicherheit or Stasi, this organization was regarded as one of the most repressive intelligence agencies in the world. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) has received international acclaim—including an Academy Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and multiple German Film Awards—for its moving portrayal of East German life under the pervasive surveillance of the Stasi. In Totalitarianism on Screen, political theorists Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV assemble top scholars to analyze the film from philosophical and political perspectives. Their essays confront the nature and legacy of East Germany’s totalitarian government and outline the reasons why such regimes endure. Other than magazine and newspaper reviews, little has been written about The Lives of Others. This volume brings German scholarship on the topic to an English-speaking audience for the first time and explores the issue of government surveillance at a time when the subject is often front-page news. Featuring contributions from German president Joachim Gauck, prominent singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, journalists Paul Hockenos and Lauren Weiner, and noted scholars Paul Cantor and James Pontuso, Totalitarianism on Screen contributes to the growing scholarship on totalitarianism and will interest historians, political theorists, philosophers, and fans of the film.

Since the moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, important German theater artists have created plays and productions about unification. Some have challenged how German history is written, while others opposed the very act of storytelling. Performing Unification examines how directors, playwrights, and theater groups including Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, and Rimini Protokoll have represented and misrepresented the past, confronting their nation’s history and collective identity. Matt Cornish surveys German-language history plays from the Baroque period through the documentary theater movement of the 1960s to show how German identity has always been contested, then turns to performances of unification after 1989. Cornish argues that theater, in its structures and its live gestures, on pages, stages, and streets, helps us to understand the past and its effect on us, our relationships with others in our communities, and our futures. Engaging with theater theory from Aristotle through Bertolt Brecht and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s “postdramatic” theater, and with theories of history from Hegel to Walter Benjamin and Hayden White, Performing Unification demonstrates that historiography and dramaturgy are intertwined.

In this book written in early 1940 in England, Sebastian Haffner, a recent refugee from Nazi Germany, analyzed Hitler, the Nazis, the German population, and German émigrés. His purpose was to help the Allies wage “psychological warfare” against Nazi Germany, to correct misconceptions about the Nazi regime, and to outline “the foundation of future peace” in Europe. “Sebastian Haffner's book is unmatched as a contemporary analysis of the Third Reich. It is quite remarkable that, writing in 1940, he could produce such acute insights into Hitler’s character and political hold over Germany” — Ian Kershaw “ ... excellent analysis of Germany's ills ... Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles, according to [Haffner], is no mere musical fantasy but a national mania, a fixation, which is driving the nation, not as some imagine, to a great and noble destiny, but to damnation ... This is a particularly penetrating study of a phenomenon whose like history has, perhaps, not ever been seen before.” — The New York Times (August 1941) “Haffner's clear-sighted analysis, applied mainly to the dissection of his fellow Germans, also annihilates any claim by his contemporaries not to have known about Nazi crimes. The nature of Hitler's regime, he says, was well understood; all that is open to debate is the eagerness with which it was supported ... Apocryphally, Churchill told his cabinet to read this book so that they would understand the Nazi threat. We should do likewise to understand how close we came to ignoring it.” — The Observer “clear-sighted and perspicacious ... This brilliant journalist shows that it was possible to see and to hear and to draw one’s conclusions if one only had the will.” —Süddeutsche Zeitung “An alarm call trying to awaken the British to the unique nature of Hitler and the Nazi regime ... Remarkably prescient” — J. G. Ballard “A powerful and sustained text ... it explodes with rhetorical fireworks. Haffner produces a convincing picture of the Nazis, their numbers, their power and the destructive nihilism that united them” — Giles MacDonogh, BBC History

A collection of conversations about the filmmaker whose life and work spanned six decades of film history