German Politics

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena - a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British.

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer's book is a study of 10 Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany.

The German Revolution of November 1918 is nowadays largely forgotten outside Germany. It is generally regarded as a failure even by those who have heard of it, a missed opportunity that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and the catastrophe to come. Robert Gerwarth argues here that to view the German Revolution in this way is a serious misjudgment. Not only did it bring down the authoritarian monarchy of the Hohenzollern, it also brought into being the first ever German democracy in an amazingly bloodless way.

Plant die längst vergessene Gesellschaft der Illuminaten einen Anschlag auf den Vatikan? Robert Langdon ermittelt. Ein Kernforscher wird in seinem Schweizer Labor ermordet aufgefunden. Auf seiner Brust finden sich merkwürdige Symbole eingraviert, Symbole, die nur der Harvardprofessor Robert Langdon zu entziffern vermag. Was er dabei entdeckt, erschreckt ihn zutiefst: Die Symbole gehören zu der legendären Geheimgesellschaft der Illuminati. Diese Gemeinschaft scheint wieder zum Leben erweckt zu sein, und sie verfolgt einen finsteren Plan, denn aus dem Labor des ermordeten Kernforschers wurde Antimaterie entwendet.

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined.

Bestsellerautor Yuval Noah Harari erklärt, wie Informationsnetzwerke unsere Welt geschaffen haben und sie jetzt zu zerstören drohen. In den letzten 100.000 Jahren hat die Menschheit enorme Macht erlangt. Doch trotz all unserer Entdeckungen, Erfindungen und Eroberungen befinden wir uns heute in einer existenziellen Krise. Die Welt steht am Rande des ökologischen Zusammenbruchs. Zuhauf werden Falschinformationen verbreitet.

J. D. Vance erzählt die Geschichte seiner Familie - eine Geschichte vom gescheiterten Aufstieg und von der Resignation einer ganzen Bevölkerungsschicht. Seine Großeltern, echte Hillbillys, das heißt Angehörige der weißen Arbeiterschaft, versuchten, mit Fleiß und Mobilität der Armut zu entkommen und sich in der Mitte der Gesellschaft zu etablieren. Doch letztlich war alles vergeblich. Misshandlung, Alkoholismus und Armut sind wesentliche Eigenschaften des Hillbilly-Lebensstils.

In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its overseas colonies. This sudden transition to a post-colonial nation left the men and women invested in German imperialism to rebuild their status on the international stage. Remnants of an earlier era, these Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate, and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as "experts" and "fellow civilizers" in discourses on nationalism and imperialism.

Germany's financial collapse in the summer of 1931 was one of the biggest economic catastrophes of modern history. It led to a global panic, brought down the international monetary system, and turned a worldwide recession into a prolonged depression. Hitler managed to profit from the crisis, because he had been the most vocal critic of the reparation regime. As the financial system collapsed, his relentless attacks against foreign creditors and the alleged complicity of the German government resonated more than ever with the electorate.

This volume explores the metaphysics of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) and its decisive influence on Immanuel Kant. For over a century, scholars have recognized the significance of Baumgarten's Metaphysics, both because of its impact on Kant's intellectual development and because of the way it fundamentally informed the work of generations of German philosophers, including Moses Mendelssohn, Thomas Abbt, Johann Gottfried Herder, Solomon Maimon, Johann August Eberhard, and arguably even Georg Friedrich Hegel.

In Berlin, Kurt Müller, an Abwehr signalman, discovers a colleague lying dead at his radio receiver. The criminal police dismiss the death as suicide, but Kurt is not convinced. Kurt follows a trail of mysteries, witnessing several atrocities that expose the Nazi regime for what it truly is. When the trail leads him to the German resistance, he faces the most difficult choices of his life. He must choose between his duty and his conscience, between his country and his family, between love and death.

1943: Kurt Muller and a young colleague parachute into southern Germany to rescue a British-Canadian agent. The Allies have won the battle of the Atlantic, and German forces are retreating on all major fronts. The war in Europe is effectively over, but the Nazis will never accept defeat. An Abwehr deserter and member of the German resistance - the Black Orchestra - with a price on his head, Kurt quickly finds himself in a deadly race to prevent the Nazis from developing the first atomic bomb and changing the outcome of the Second World War.

When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation.

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman's Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt's executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment.

Bestsellerautor Yuval Noah Harari erklärt, wie Informationsnetzwerke unsere Welt geschaffen haben und sie jetzt zu zerstören drohen In den letzten 100.000 Jahren hat die Menschheit enorme Macht erlangt. Doch trotz all unserer Entdeckungen, Erfindungen und Eroberungen befinden wir uns heute in einer existenziellen Krise. Die Welt steht am Rande des ökologischen Zusammenbruchs. Zuhauf werden Falschinformationen verbreitet.

Nancy Pelosi gewährt einen faszinierenden Blick in ihr Privatleben, vor allem aber hinter die Kulissen US-amerikanischer Macht. Erstmals spricht Nancy Pelosi offen über die entscheidenden Momente, Erfahrungen und Strategien, die ihre politische Karriere und ihr Leben prägten. Als erste weibliche Sprecherin des Repräsentantenhauses in der Geschichte der USA arbeitete sie mit Präsidenten von George W. Bush bis Joe Biden zusammen.

Im Dezember 1988 kommen beim Lockerbie-Bombenanschlag alle 259 Passagiere einer Boeing 747 ums Leben, darunter auch Maureen, die Verlobte des US-Collegestudenten Mitch Rapp. Ein Jahr nach ihrem Tod wird Mitch von der CIA rekrutiert und schließt sich dem geheimen Orion-Team an, das gegen den weltweiten Terror in den Kampf zieht. An Krisenherden in Europa, im Nahen Osten und Asien bewältigt er den Verlust seiner großen Liebe und sucht nach einem neuen Sinn für sein Leben.

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves?