German Politics

Emerging from a collection of disparate city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a searching and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate.

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.

From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland and the United States. In the early decades of the 20th century, German artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and engineers were leading their freshly unified country to new and undreamed of heights, and by 1933, they had won more Nobel prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans combined.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

Chomsky disecciona los diez principios fundamentales de la concentración de la riqueza y el poder en Estados Unidos, que a efectos prácticos han secuestrado la democracia en favor de los intereses de una élite políticofinanciera, sumiendo a un gran porcentaje de la población en la miseria y desesperanza más absolutas. Con su habitual agudeza, Chomsky muestra cómo los principales excesos y rasgos espeluznantes de la realidad estadounidense forman parte de una estrategia integral por parte de la casta dominante para aferrarse al poder y a los privilegios que éste conlleva. 

In postwar Vienna, the term peace is relative - the Americans, British and Russians govern the city in an uneasy truce, and the main difference is that now it's the Soviet secret police making people disappear rather than the Nazis. When Bernie is asked by a high-ranking Soviet official to clear an old Kripo colleague's name of the murder of an American officer, he quickly realises he's in over his head.

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.

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.

Nach Ansicht vieler hat die USA den stärksten destabilisierenden Einfluss auf das Weltgeschehen und stellen somit die größte Bedrohung für den Weltfrieden dar (Allensbach 2019, Gallup International 2019). Diese traurige Spitzenstellung hat sich die Weltmacht Nr. 1 nicht von ungefähr erworben. Keine andere Nation hat seit 1945 so viele andere Länder bombardiert, so viele Regierungen gestürzt wie die USA. Die USA unterhalten die meisten Militärstützpunkte, exportieren die meisten Waffen und haben den höchsten Rüstungsetat der Welt.

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?

Edited and with an introduction by philosopher Tom Whyman, this new abridged version The German Ideology sheds new light on one of the most difficult, disputed texts in Marx’s oeuvre. Written in 1846 and subsequently abandoned by Marx and Engels, only to be rescued in the 1930s by researchers in the USSR, The German Ideology is the high point of Marx’s philosophical thought: A brilliantly insightful, still thrillingly radical work of materialist philosophical therapy.

Gil Shannon ist einer der tödlichsten Scharfschützen der US Navy und ein SEAL mit Leib und Seele. Gerade genießt er mit seiner Frau seinen wohlverdienten Urlaub, als er einen Hilferuf aus Afghanistan erhält. Eine Hubschrauberpilotin des Special-Forces-Teams wurde während eines Hinterhalts schwer verletzt und entführt. Dann taucht ein Video auf, das zeigt, wie die Pilotin während ihrer Gefangenschaft brutal geschlagen und vergewaltigt wird.

Auf den Skipisten von Utah ereignet sich ein unglaublicher Vorfall: In einem spektakulären Coup entführen Terroristen den Präsidenten der USA und töten dabei 30 Männer des Geheimdienstes. Nur der junge Scot Harvath überlebt. Während Secret Service, FBI, CIA und der verdächtig unentschlossene Vizepräsident erklären, dass eine Vereinigung aus dem Nahen Osten hinter dem Angriff steckt, glaubt Harvath keine Sekunde daran. Also beginnt er auf eigene Faust zu ermitteln.

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.