Postcards From Berlin

Catriona Lydgate is a housewife with two children and an adoring husband. But beneath the surface of her seemingly perfect life are the dark secrets of the past she's tried to forget. Disturbing postcards begin arriving in the mail; she is recognized by a man who knew her from her past -- an avalanche of small moments that will threaten everything she thought was real. When her youngest daughter falls ill with a mysterious illness, the doctors and even her husband suspect that she is deliberately making her child sick. As her marriage unravels, she comes dangerously close to the edge -- and to losing everything that she loves -- as the past she has fought so hard to bury becomes her witness and prosecutor. This is a haunting, heartbreaking novel: domestic fiction at its very finest.

In Postcards from Europe, Rick Steves takes you on a private tour through the heart of Europe - introducing you to his local friends and sharing his favorite travel moments - from the Netherlands through Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, with a grand Parisian finale. Whether you're dreaming in an armchair, have packed, or are unpacking, Postcards from Europe will inspire a love of travel, of Europe, and of Europeans.

What really goes on behind closed doors? Catriona has the life she’s always dreamed of: a loving husband, a delightful step-daughter and her own precious little girl, Daisy. When Daisy begins to feel poorly, Catriona seeks help and, in doing so, is forced to look to the past and her own dark and fractured childhood.

Berlin. The last days of the Second World War. All Germans are bad, right? Wrong. Meet Tuomas Dressler, a fifteen year old boy forced to fight to the end in the Hitler Youth. A boy who has not been convinced by the rhetoric of the fanatics around him. A boy lost in the chaos that is defeat not knowing if his family is alive or dead. Lost, until the British take him and read the diary he has written at his peril. Given the choice of fending for himself amongst the ruins of Berlin and facing the wrath of Russian soldiers out to kill, or helping the British identify Nazis - there really is no choice. He has no loyalty to Nazis, having heard about the horrors they have committed. Besides, he has high hopes of finding his parents and little sister - and maybe the Jewish neighbours who used to be friends. This is a poignant story of a child forced too soon into the harsh realities of a failing world. Will he survive? Read Postcards From Berlin to find out.

Between 1945 and 1961, an estimated 2.5 million people fled East Germany in search of the political and economic freedom offered by West Germany. To thwart this tide of defections, on the morning of August 13, 1961, hundreds of East German troops began erecting the Berlin wall--a barrier that would take nearly twenty years to complete and would eventually span 166 kilometers. In Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie, the Bodleian Library assembles a stunning collection of images to document the wall's impact worldwide. The postcards in this fascinating volume trace the development of the wall--from its beginnings as a simple stretch of barbed wire to the daunting final structure made of concrete and containing over 300 watchtowers. The images capture scenes of tension and urgency, such as those at Checkpoint Charlie, where we see Allied and East German soldiers coldly observing one another through binoculars. Others document the wall's ties with American history, including pictures of John F. Kennedy in 1963 when he declared his solidarity with all Berliners and a picture of Ronald Regan when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall. Also included are images from the toppling of the wall, when thousands of joyful East Germans realized the fulfillment of their personal dreams and marked the conclusion of the cold war. An intimate look at one of the most visible manifestations of the postwar divide, Portraits from Checkpoint Charlie presents a key location in twentieth-century history through the eyes of those on the scene.

On photography's role in social communication, from early analog film to social media Photography has always been a social medium shared with others. But why do we communicate with each other using images? This publication explores the development of photography from a means of communication in the 19th century to its current digital representation online. Artists include: ABC Artists' Books Cooperative, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin with Der Greif, David Campany & Anastasia Samoylova, Fredi Casco, Moyra Davey, Themistokles von Eckenbrecher, Martin Fengel & Jörg Koopmann, Stuart Franklin, Gilbert & George, Dieter Hacker, Tomas van Houtryve, Philippe Kahn, On Kawara, Erik Kessels, Marc Lee, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mike Mandel, Theresa Martinat, Eva & Franco Mattes, Jonas Meyer & Christin Müller, Peter Miller, Romain Roucoules, Thomas Ruff, Taryn Simon & Aaron Swartz, Andreas Slominski, Clare Strand and Corinne Vionnet.

Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ... This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. 'One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever' Alan Furst 'Terrific ... a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller' Irish Times 'An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin' Philip Kerr 'To read Fallada's testament to the darkest years of the 20th century is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: "This is how it was. This is what happened"' The New York Times

The first full-length study of a once revolutionary visual and linguistic medium Literature has “died” many times—this book tells the story of its death by postcard. Picturing the Postcard looks to this unlikely source to shed light on our collective, modern-day obsession with new media. The postcard, almost unimaginably now, produced at the end of the nineteenth century the same anxieties and hopes that many people think are unique to twenty-first-century social media such as Facebook or Twitter. It promised a newly connected social world accessible to all and threatened the breakdown of authentic social relations and even of language. Arguing that “new media” is as much a discursive object as a material one, and that it is always in dialogue with the media that came before it, Monica Cure reconstructs the postcard’s history through journals, legal documents, and sources from popular culture, analyzing the postcard’s representation in fiction by well-known writers such as E. M. Forster and Edith Wharton and by more obscure writers like Anne Sedgwick and Herbert Flowerdew. Writers deployed uproar over the new medium of the postcard by Anglo-American cultural critics to mirror anxieties about the changing nature of the literary marketplace, which included the new role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity and the loss of privacy, an increasing dependence on new technologies, and the rise of mass media. Literature kept open the postcard’s possibilities and in the process reimagined what literature could be.