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Book Cover
E-book
Author Jarausch, Konrad Hugo, author.

Title Broken Lives : How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century / Konrad H. Jarausch
Published Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

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Description 1 online resource ((xiii, 446 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction: Narratives of German experiences -- PART I: PREWAR CHILDHOOD -- 1. Imperial ancestors -- 2. Weimar children -- 3. Nazi adolescents -- PART II: WARTIME YOUTH -- 4. Male violence -- 5. Female struggles -- 6. Victims' suffering -- PART III: POSTWAR ADULTHOOD -- 7. Defeat as new beginning -- 8. Democratic maturity -- 9. Communist disappointment -- Conclusion: Memories of fractured lives
Summary Broken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes 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 the generation of Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who 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. Written decades after the events, these testimonies, many of them unpublished, look back on the mistakes of young people caught up in the Nazi movement. In many, early enthusiasm turns to deep disillusionment as the price of complicity with a brutal dictatorship--fighting at the front, aerial bombing at home, murder in the concentration camps-becomes clear. Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives reveals the intimate human details of historical events and 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 this racist dictatorship and come to embrace human rights? Jarausch argues that this generation's focus on its own suffering, often maligned by historians, ultimately led to a more critical understanding of national identity-one that helped transform Germany from a military aggressor into a pillar of European democracy
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 383-435) and index
Notes In English
Subject Political culture -- Germany
HISTORY -- Europe -- Germany.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Personal Memoirs.
Economic history
Political culture
Social conditions
Alltag
Lebenslauf
Nationalbewusstsein
SUBJECT Germany -- History -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85054584
Germany -- Social conditions -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh90000541
Germany -- Economic conditions -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85054496
Subject Germany
Deutschland
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781400889334
1400889332
Other Titles Broken lives : how ordinary germans experienced the twentieth century