Princeton University Press
Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century
Key Metrics
- Konrad H Jarausch
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691196480
- 8.8 X 5.7 X 1.3 inches
- 1.55 pounds
- History > Europe - Germany
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
The gripping stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition--but also recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation
Broken Lives is a gripping account of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did. Drawing on six dozen memoirs by Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives offers new insights about persistent questions. Why did so many Germans support Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi inhumanity? How did they finally distance themselves from the Nazi past and come to embrace human rights? The result is a powerful portrait of the experiences of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and out of the abyss of a dark century.
Author Bio
Konrad H. Jarausch has written or edited about forty books in modern German and European history. Starting with Hitler’s seizure of power and the First World War, his research interests have moved to the social history of German students and professions German unification in 1989/90, with historiography under the Communist GDR, the nature of the East German dictatorship, as well as the debate about historians and the Third Reich.
More recently, he has been concerned with the problem of interpreting twentieth-century German history in general, the learning processes after 1945, the issue of cultural democratization, and the relationship between Honecker and Breshnew.
Education
- MA University of Wisconsin, 1964
PhD University of Wisconsin, 1969
Source: University of North Carolina
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