Mary Fulbrook - A History of Germany 1918 - 2020

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1 Unemployed dock workers in January 1931

2 Members of the Nazi League of German Girls (BDM) walk proudly down the street of a German town

3 Hitler’s triumphal arrival to popular acclaim in his former home town of Linz during the 1938 Anschluss of Austria (which subsequently represented itself as ‘Hitler’s first victim’)

4 German soldiers execute ‘partisans’, Lithuania, 1944

5 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, who, if they survived the misery, hunger and sickness of ghetto life, would ultimately be transported and murdered in an extermination camp

6 The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, in a landscape of rubble at the end of the Second World War

7 West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer looks uncomfortable on a visit to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, in August 1961, a week after the Berlin Wall was erected

8 Schoolchildren on their weekly ‘day in industry’ in the ‘people’s own factory’, with which their school is twinned, admire the progress board in the ‘competition for fulfilment of the plan’

9 Erich Honecker handing over the one millionth new apartment built in the GDR, surrounded by workers in hard hats, and children from a local creche

10 Couple watching television, Er magazine cover, 1952

11 East Berliners hack out mementoes from the now defunct Berlin Wall, in spring 1990

12 Demonstration against rising rents and gentrification, Kreuzberg, Berlin, June 2013

13 ‘Stolpersteine’ – pavement ‘cobblestones to stumble over’, commemorating former Jewish inhabitants who were deported and murdered by the Nazis

14 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in the heart of Berlin, spreading over several acres between the Brandenburg Gate and the site of Hitler’s bunker and providing an inescapable and controversial reminder of the Jewish victims of Nazism

15 CDU poster ‘Wir haben mehr zu bieten’ (‘We have more to offer’) showing CDU candidates Vera Lengsfeld (formerly Vera Wollenberger) and Angela Merkel

2.1 The Versailles settlement, 1919

3.1 The electoral performance of the NSDAP, 1924–1932

4.1 The Reichstag elections, 5 March 1933

4.2 Territorial annexation, 1935–1939

5.1 The partition of Poland, 1939

5.2 Hitler’s empire by autumn 1942

5.3 Major concentration camps, including extermination centres

5.4 Proportions of Europe’s Jewish population murdered in the Final Solution

6.1 The division of Germany after 1945

13.1 United Germany, 1990

I have amended and added to the text for this expanded fifth edition in a number of ways. In particular, the analysis of the Berlin Republic has been extended to the end of August 2020; the section on the Holocaust has been amended in light of an ever-expanding historiography that has significantly enhanced knowledge and understanding; and there have been minor revisions to content and analysis throughout the text, more in some chapters than others. As before, I have resisted the temptation to engage in radical alterations of style and argument that would have turned it into a substantially different book. However, aware that in some areas debates and approaches have moved on considerably, I have updated by light rewriting where relevant. A few additions and alterations have also been made to what remains a highly select bibliography at the end; this is not intended to be comprehensive but merely to provide some starting points and suggestions for readers wishing to explore particular periods and topics in greater depth.

The fourth edition includes substantially updated material for Chapter 14on the Berlin Republic, as well as a number of amendments throughout the text, reflecting the changing emphases of the historiography over recent years. I have again decided against major restructuring and rewriting, although in many areas, if I were to start afresh, it would be a substantially different book. I would like in particular to thank the following for their helpful written comments on the previous edition, particularly relating to references to Poland throughout the work: Professor Daria Nałe¸cz of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Lazarski University; Professor Marek Wierzbicki of the Catholic University of Lublin; and Marcin Wodzin´ski of the University of Wrocław; as well as other participants in a meeting on ‘Recovering Forgotten History’ which took place in Warsaw in 2011.I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for Blackwell for their various suggestions regarding the whole text, and Carl for his characteristically perceptive and intelligent comments on aspects of Weimar culture.

In making revisions for the third edition, I have added a separate chapter on Germany since unification, and have substantially updated the bibliography. In some sections of the book, I have also amended the text where I felt that there were significant omissions, or where the historiography has moved on so much that my previous remarks could not be left untouched. In making revisions, however, I have again had to resist the temptation to write a substantially new book, and have left the original lines of argument and organization intact.