Richard Bessel Libri

In the beginning of 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen. As many as a million people died violent deaths in January alone. That stark fact provides the starting point for this book, which examines Germany's emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; millions of survivors had lost their families, homes and health; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses. Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. This is the story of Germany in 1945, a story of life after death. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse, social disintegration, and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of war and total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on their own personal concerns. Germany's transition to a period of relative peace, prosperity and civilized behaviour is the hinge on which Europe's twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.

In Violence: A Modern Obsession, Professor Richard Bessel explores changing attitudes towards violence, focusing primarily on developments in twentieth-century Europe and North America. He does so by examining violent spectacle, political and revolutionary violence, the violence of war, violence and religion, as well as domestic violence, and then considers attempts to control violence and how it has been remembered and commemorated

As this book shows, Nazi ideology was based on two central beliefs: in war and race. Peace was merely a preparation for war, war which would redraw the racial map of Europe. The author begins with the aftermath of the First World War and the corrosive myth-building which substituted memories of senseless slaughter with the myth of a meaningful and even sacred event. It moves on steadily through the 1920s and the Nazi seizure of power, to the economic boom, massive rearmament and Jew-baiting of the 1930s. And then on to the war itself and the Nazis' racist war of extermination. The author pays particular attention to the chaos and extreme violence of the last months of the war, so catastrophic for the German people that they came to believe that they too had been victims of the war. Finally he describes the aftermath of the Second World War and the wreckage left behind by the Nazis which affected the lives of Germans and Europeans far beyond May 1945.

A social history of Germany in the years following the First World War, this book explores Germany's defeat and the subsequent demobilization of its armies, events which had devastating social and psychological consequences for the nation. Bessel examines the changes brought by the War to Germany, including those resulting from the return of soldiers to civilian life and the effects of demobilization on the economy. He demonstrates that the postwar transition was viewed as a moral crusade by Germans desperately concerned about challenges to traditional authority; and he assesses the ways in which the experience of the War, and memories of it, affected the politics of the Weimar Republic. This is an original and scholarly book, which offers important insights into the sense of dislocation, both personal and national, experienced by Germany and Germans in the 1920s, and its damaging legacy for German democracy.

Even today, the Third Reich-the regime that instigated the most destructive war in modern history-evokes powerful images of fascination and horror. Yet how were the lives of the ordinary German people of the 1930s and '40s affected by the politics of Hitler and his followers? Looking beyond the catalog of events, this intriguing book reveals that daily German life involved a complex mixture of bribery and terror; of fear and concessions; of barbarism and appeals to conventional moral values employed by the Nazis to maintain their grip on society. Eight leading historians present essays that shed fresh light on topics as familiar as the role of political violence in Nazi seizure of power and the German view of Hitler himself. It also focuses on lesser-known aspects of life in the Third Reich, such as village life, the treatment of "social outcasts," and the Germans' own retrospective view of this period of their history.

The aim of this volume is to redress this situation by probing, in depth, a limited number of incidents of public disorder and focusing particularly on the role of the police. In doing so, this collection will draw out general patterns of police provocation and public responses and suggest general hypotheses. schovat popis

No failure in democratic history had such far reaching consequences as the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Recent debate has centered upon the viability of Weimar democracy and the inevitability of its failure in the context of insuperable economic problems. The papers presented here offer perspect

Die SED-Diktatur in der DDR war geprägt von einer umfassenden Kontrolle, gestützt durch Mauer, Stacheldraht und die Stasi. Der totale Herrschaftsanspruch der Partei erstreckte sich über Politik, Wirtschaft, Recht, Verwaltung und Kultur. Dennoch war die Reichweite dieser Herrschaft nicht unbegrenzt. Historisches Erbe, das die SED übernehmen musste, schränkte ihre diktatorischen Möglichkeiten ein. Die Mauer symbolisierte sowohl Macht als auch Ohnmacht. Bereiche wie Familie, Kirche und Wissenschaft entzogen sich teilweise der totalitären Kontrolle. Zudem überforderte sich die SED, indem sie versuchte, alle Lebensbereiche zu dirigieren, was zu ihren Grenzen führte. Diese Grenzen der Diktatur bedeuten nicht mehr politische Freiheit oder Rechtsstaatlichkeit, noch soll das Regime verharmlost werden. Der zentrale Fokus der Beiträge liegt auf der Frage, was im totalitären Gestaltungsanspruch der SED nicht verwirklicht werden konnte. Diese Frage, insbesondere in der Frühzeit der DDR, wird konkret behandelt, dank der umfangreichen Zugänglichkeit der Archive des SED-Staats. Die täglichen Widersprüche und Probleme der Herrschaftspraxis verdeutlichen die Grenzen dieser Herrschaft. Um die gesellschaftliche Realität in der DDR zu verstehen, ist es wichtig, sowohl die Ausdehnung als auch die Grenzen der Diktatur zu betrachten. Die Geschichte der DDR ist mehr als nur die Erzählung einer unbegrenzten Herrschaft.