The democratic experiment of 1918-1933, from defeat in WW1 to the rise of the Nazis. Jähner's description of living through this chaotic period is almost as thrilling as Hitchcock.
A gorgeous book on CDF on the 250th anniversary of his birth, to accompany the spectacular exhibition in Hamburg. Notes, essays and outstanding reproductions.
Traces the history of Sefton Delmer, the English propagandist who waged a disinformation war in Nazi Germany, and how that history can help us understand the present.
A nifty little book on this fascinating artist. Queen of collage, doyenne of Dada, Höch's avant-garde approach to paper and photography cut to the heart of Germany's political and cultural ... read more
An exceptional memoir of growing up in northern Germany in the 1930s and of the slide into war. The historian and novelist is warm and humorous as well as observant and meticulous. An unnerv... read more
Seeing the writing on the wall, some Nazi profiteers set about removing their loot from Germany in the early months of 1945: to Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and South America. Locher... read more
The upheavals of 1930s' Germany created a cultural diaspora as composers and musicians fled abroad: Kurt Weill, Korngold and many lesser-known artists too.
Kampfner began his career as a journalist reporting from East Berlin. Since then he has quartered the city, searched archives, interviewed widely. He loves this city. His last book - Why the... read more
A love affair and its aftermath, set in the closing years of the GDR. The girl is young, the man significantly older; the alteration in their love finds a parallel in the oppression of the r... read more
In less than a month in 1870, the Prussian army invaded France, captured Napoleon III and changed the balance of world power. Its success had far-reaching effects...
Brought up in Germany as a good National Socialist, KF was repatriated with her half-English mother to England. A poignant account of the C20th political buffetings navigated by three genera... read more
Escape to the West and life in the East through the eyes of a young woman loyal to the GDR: oppression in conflict with idealism. First published in East Germany in 1963.
A splendid illustrated book on the dramatic figures in wood and stone that started appearing in the palaces and churches of the German-speaking lands in the C17th.
All that remains of the Osnabruk synagogue is a small pile of stones and some chickenwire: a space of oblivion in the German city explored by Cixous, whose Jewish mother came from there.
Schmidt was an Austrian diplomat who served as Foreign Minister 1936-1938. With access to previously unpublished family papers, Bassett shows how this controversial figure in fact tried to m... read more
The Jena set: Caroline Schlegel's salon in the 1790s, in that small German university town, included Novalis, Schiller, Hegel, Goethe and Humboldt. They radically changed our ideas as the Fr... read more
The author of Europe's Tragedy, the definitive book on the Thirty Years War, has written a powerful narrative of five centuries of political, military, technological and economic change in G... read more
Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more
A powerful novel set in the closing stages of WW2, in which a 12-year-old girl escapes to the German countryside with her mother and older sister. Translated from the German.
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
It is 30 years since Hazel Holt's biography; many more since David Cecil and Philip Larkin championed her novels. The surprise, perhaps, is that she is read more now than when she first publ... read more
Explores the interaction of mass-market diamonds and German colonialism in Africa. Or how the new American fashion for diamond engagement rings funded Germany in two world wars.
Set in 1943, and first published in German in 1968, this is the story of a young boy torn between loyalties for his father, a police officer, and his friend Max Ludwig Nansen, an Expressioni... read more
The choices made by five women, all of whom experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall in their teens, and now grapple with different kinds of freedom. This has been a huge success in Germany.
Blaschka père et fils were from Bohemia but moved to Dresden, where they worked in glass from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, making intricate models of sea anemones, medusas, corals and starfi... read more
As a young man in Germany, AW's grandfather published Kafka and several other depraved authors whose work the Nazis were keen to burn. He fled in 1933, eventually settling in New York where ... read more
SM's parents were German Jewish refugees; he was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. His maternal aunts concealed their origins too and had very diffe... read more