Germany Since 1945

Beginning with the day of Nazi Germany's surrender, this book traces the main political, social and economic developments in occupied Germany, in both German states up to 1990, and in reunited Germany. A chapter is devoted to the unification of the country in 1989-90, while the final chapter provides a comprehensive short survey of post-unification Germany, covering the period up to the Iraq crisis in 2003.

A comprehensive account of Jewish life in a country that carries the legacy of being at the epicenter of the Holocaust. Originally published in German in 2012, this comprehensive history of Jewish life in postwar Germany provides a systematic account of Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st Century by leading experts of modern German-Jewish history. Beginning in the immediate postwar period with a large concentration of Eastern European Holocaust survivors stranded in Germany, the book follows Jews during the relative quiet period of the 50s and early 60s during which the foundations of new Jewish life were laid. Brenner’s volume goes on to address the rise of anti-Israel sentiments after the Six Day War as well as the beginnings of a critical confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past in the late 60s and early 70s, noting the relatively small numbers of Jews living in Germany up to the 90s. The contributors argue that these Jews were a powerful symbolic presence in German society and sent a meaningful signal to the rest of the world that Jewish life was possible again in Germany after the Holocaust. “This volume, which illuminates a multi-faceted panorama of Jewish life after 1945, will remain the authoritative reading on the subject for the time to come.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “An eminently readable work of history that addresses an important gap in the scholarship and will appeal to specialists and interested lay readers alike.” —Reading Religion “Comprehensive, meticulously researched, and beautifully translated.” —CHOICE

Peter C. Caldwell and Karrin Hanshew's Germany Since 1945 traces the social, political and cultural history of Germany from the end of the Second World War right up to the present day. The book provides a narrative that not only explores the histories of East and West Germany in their international contexts, but one that also takes the significantly different world of the Berlin Republic seriously, analyzing it as a distinct and significant period of German history in its own right. Split into three parts roughly devoted to a quarter-century each, this book guides students through contemporary Germany from the catastrophe of war, genocide and the country's division to the very different challenges facing the reunified Germany of the 21st century. There are key primary source excerpts integrated throughout the text, as well as 32 images, numerous maps, charts and tables and a detailed bibliography to further aid study. The book is complemented by online resources which include sample syllabi and a pedagogical supplement. Germany Since 1945 underscores both the particularities of German history and the international trends and transactions that shaped it, giving good coverage to key aspects of post-1945 German society and politics, including: * East and West German paths to reconstruction * The development of consumer society and the welfare state * The politics of memory and coming to terms with the Nazi past * The Cold War * New social and political movements that opposed the postwar status * Immigration and the move toward a multicultural society This is an essential text for any student of contemporary German history.

As the birthplace of the Reformation, Germany has been the site of some of the most significant moments in the history of European Christianity. Today, however, its religious landscape is one that would scarcely be recognizable to earlier generations. This groundbreaking survey of German postwar religious life depicts a profoundly changed society: congregations shrink, private piety is on the wane, and public life has almost entirely shed its Christian character, yet there remains a booming market for syncretistic and individualistic forms of “popular religion.” Losing Heaven insightfully recounts these dramatic shifts and explains their consequences for German religious communities and the polity as a whole.

Difficult Pasts provides a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary Germany's rich memorial landscape. It discusses the many memorials to German losses during the Second World War, to the victims of National Socialism and to those of GDR socialism. With up-to-date coverage of many less well-known memorials as well as the most publicised ones.

Publisher Description

Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad. Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news. News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.

Although “entanglement” has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined.