Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using 'reckoning' in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely through time. Fulbrook exposes the disjuncture between official myths about 'dealing with the past' and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility. In the successor states to the Third Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria-prosecution varied widely. Communist East Germany pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, caught between facing up to the past and seeking to draw a line under it, tended toward selective justice and reintegration of former Nazis; and Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the mid-1980s, when news broke about Austrian presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim's past. The continuing battle with the legacies of Nazism in the private sphere was often at odds with public remembrance and memorials.
This audiobook provides a clear and informative guide to the twists and turns of German history from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The multi-faceted, problematic history of the German lands has furnished a wide range of debates and differences of interpretation. Mary Fulbrook provides a crisp synthesis of a vast array of historical material, and explores the interrelationships between social, political and cultural factors in the light of scholarly controversies. First published in 1990, A Concise History of Germany is the only single-volume history of Germany in English that offers a broad, general coverage. It has become standard reading for English-speaking students of German, European studies and history, and is a useful guide to general readers, members of the business community and travellers to Germany.
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