Germany Books

This will be a true asset in educating our youth. Down to earth views that advance the way our youth view their education and how to advance into higher ed. Looking forward to your future writings.

I have yet to read the book I will however be purchasing one!
Just wanted to let you know that I am oh so very proud of you!
And congratulations, it's good to see my fam' doing well...May God
Continue to Bless You

I will not bore you with a lengthy review. This is a great book with lots of rare and candid pics you normally don't see. A MUST PICK-UP for anyone who is interested in the subject. I got lucky enough to have mine signed by the author!

Eric Queen's "Red Shines the Sun: A Pictorial History of the Fallschirm-Infanterie" is much more than a photo collection of the German airborne infantry in World War II. It is in fact a fairly authoritative history and source reference, containing interviews with German WWII paratroopers as well as photographs of dozens of contemporary documents.

Queen covers the creation and training of the German airborne corps and its use in various campaigns. But the strength of this book is his reliance on surviving veterans to tell their story, beginning with why they volunteered to be paratroopers to their battles in the various theaters and campaigns of the war.

From the beginning to the end of the war, Germany's paratroopers were Hitler's elite soldiers and the Allies learned to expect fanatical resistance wherever they encountered them - from North Africa to Northwestern Europe.

For those interested in the German airborne in World War II - this volume is well worth the price!

When eleven year old Marianne is taken on a kindertransport to London, England, without her mother she is terrified. Then she is taken to a house that doesn't really want her. She doesn't know what to do! She goes to school and meets a friend Brigdet. Soon World War II happened so she had to go to Wales with her school to hide. She starts living with these people who try and replace their dead daughter with Marianne.

Will she ever find her mother? Read the book and find out. This is an exciting book that took me one day to read it because it was so good!

When war is declared, Mrs. Kohn decides that Berlin is not a good environment for he teenage daughter, Marianne, so she sends her on a ship that helps smuggle Jewish Refugees over into Liverpool, England into safety, but, parents were not allowed to go. Of course, Marianne did not want to leave her beloved mother to go to a foreign country. She couldn't even speak English! But Marianne has no choice. In Liverpool she is moved from foster family until finally she settles into a home. Will Marianne ever see her dear mother again? Read the book to see.

Primarily a memoir for his first twenty years of life, Jurgen Herbst goes into great detail about his coming-of-age experiences in the Third Reich. He was raised in the Prussian military tradition emphasizing a strong sense of family, country, and church, and thus spends his adolescence trying to reconcile these notions with the propaganda and events of Hitler's Reich. He joins the Jungvolk (as all youths in Germany were required) and sees it primarily as a means to advance into the military career he has always dreamed of. Along the way, through his experiences, he sees that the Third Reich is not all it claims to be.

Herbst's book, which reads very much like a novel, is one-of-a-kind; not many books describe the life and experiences of boys in the Jungvolk or the Hitler Jugend. Even if you only have a cursory interest in Nazi Germany, I highly recommend reading this book.

I took courses in the History of Education under Dr. Herbst (1967-69)and found him to be a very engaging teacher--one of the best I had in graduate school. I knew nothing about his past, except that he was German-born, until I heard of this book. This man has a way with words! In this brief but very compact and vivid memoir, he deals with some of the great dilemmas of life--in any period--,although of course he focuses on the period 1928-1948, his first twenty years. Herbst's memoir reminds me of another memoir of a childhood that can teach us all many valuable lessons (Irving Louis Horowitz, DAYDREAMS AND NIGHTMARES). REQUIEM is profoundly gripping. A must-read (and probably re-read) to help us understand our own times . . .and our own selves.

The "Three R's", as we students used to call it, was the standard text on this period of German history throughout the world during the '50s and '70s. I know of no other book that has replaced it.

My only complaint is that it's light on military matters.

I did not think I would like this book - but it turned out to be surprisingly excellent. It is an excellent history of the politics and social movements for the period. Anyone one who considers them self to be a student of Prussian or German history should read this book. It is a scholarly work - not a popular history. If you take the time to read it you will learn some things.

As a student of history I have had to read many books about the the rise of the Nazi party, and I must say that this one by far is the best! It is well researched and quite honestly a real page turner. I highly recomend it for anyone interested in Nazi politics.

Benjamin Lapp's magnum opus, "Revolution from the Right" is a fantastic source for scholars looking in the Weimar period of German History. Lapp's style is much like the style of William Sheridan Allen's "Nazi Seizure of Power". Lapp's book is simply a superb historical synthesis. Not many authors have choose to study single towns/provences during the Weimar Republic/Nazi revolution. One can only ponder of all footwork and sweat in writing such a concise historical book. One can study the social, political, economic, and emotional aspects of the Nazi revolution in Saxony. I would recomend this book to anyone who believes they know how common German people reacted to the Nazi movement. This book will add another aspect of the Nazi movement in Germany to anyone's repertoire.

Rose has written a masterful book, capturing the true essence of Antisemitism. I highly recommend this masterpiece. Buy it!

This book details the "bipartisan" nature of German anti-semitism. Non-Christian revolutionaries hated Jews as well, and Rose details their reasons by analyzing the political opinions of various Romantic/German philosophers of the 18th, 19th Centuries. He covers Kant, Hegel, Voltaire, Fichte, Marx, and ends with Wagner, and shows the intellectual development of revolutionary anti-semitism through these philosophers. Some are well-known, like the aforementioned ideologues, others are lesser known. The book shows the development of an anti-Semitic mythology, that began as a Christian anti-Semitism (the Ahasverus-Wandering Jew, Moloch and Mammon), yet by the beginning of the 20th Century, was a fully Secularized anti-semitism.

The important lesson from this book is how entrenched Jew hatred was across the German intellectual landscape in the 19th Century. It wasn't limited to a bunch of Capitalist Christians (as accused by many Marxist historians, who would no doubt be ashamed that their hero Marx hated Judaism), but atheists and socialists as well. A good companion book to this is "Scientific Origins of National Socialism", about Ernst Haeckel and the Monist League, and how the German scientists caved into Jew-hatred as well.

This book is both great history and a wonderful personal narrative.

Thomas Jeffers is an aging bombardier suffering the debilitating effects of a series of strokes. His daughter, Marilyn Walton, becomes determined to find out all she can about her father's World War II experiences as a B-24 Liberator bombardier and prisoner of war. Her quest, through the miracle of the internet, phone calls, and snail mail, takes her to his long-lost crewmen, to an understanding of his wartime experiences, even to the spot where her father's plane crashed in a German wood sixty years ago.

During her journey, she learns much about her father, the nature of courage and suffering, an incredible array of Air Corps history, and about herself.

Jeffers and his crew mates on the B-24 Rhapsody in Junk were shot down over Germany and forced to parachute at low altitude. Their plane crashed into a wood near a small German village. Jeffers endured interrogation and imprisonment in one of the German Luftwaffe's Stalag Lufts, the same camp where the Great Escape took place. Near the war's end, as the Russian Army threatened to recapture the camp, the men of Stalag Luft I were force-marched great distances in one of the coldest winters of the twentieth century.

Like most of the men of the Greatest Generation, Jeffers returned from the war and put it behind him, raising a family and living an exemplary life. As strokes began to rob him of his memories, Walton became determined to re-discover them before it was too late. She educated herself in the maze of official paperwork recounting her dad's training, missions, and the demise of Rhapsody in Junk. She studied the MACR for clues about where the plane came down, and where the men were captured and moved. She tracked down surviving members of her father's crew. And with the help of a young German high school student, she made two trips to the German village where the plane crashed, even finding pieces of the plane that had been salvaged by villagers and turned into everyday objects.

Her journey also brought home the point that the war had brought great suffering to civilians on both sides, and she shares stories of the German people she met and befriended on her visits.

In the end, Walton successfully pieces together, from beginning to end, the story of her father's war experiences, using primary documents, interviews, and good old-fashioned heavy reading. It is a book which will appeal to anyone who has had a father in the Air Corps in World War Two, especially one who was a Prisoner of War.

What makes the book truly special is that Walton is a born storyteller, and she mixes personal observations about her relationship with her father both in the past and in his final days with her war story. It thus becomes a book not only about one man, one air crew, and the war they fought, but an intensly personal book about a daughter's love for her father and her need to preserve his story for future generations.

Highly recommended. Five stars.

Rob Morris, Author, Untold Valor: Forgotten Stories of American Bomber Crewmen Over Europe in World War Two (Potomac Books, 2006)

Rhapsody is an impassioned journey by a dedicated daughter to tell the story of her father and his fellow crewmembers, their penetration into the hellish flak over Germany, being shot down and interned as POWs. Marilyn Walton is also able to show the effects on the other side of the exploding bombs through her personal quest to find the spot where her father's B-24 went down, the details of one crewmember who didn't make it, and the crew's journey through a hostile country and into prisoner of war camps.

The book's historical and technical accuracy rivals Miller's Masters of the Air, and the personal sensitivities of Kershaw's Bedford Boys.

Rhapsody in Junk is a must read for anyone wanting a sensitive and in-depth look into the lives of the brave young men who laid it all on the line to save the world from tyranny.

In June of 2000 I cycled 750 miles in Germany along the rivers Mainz, Rhein (Bingen to Koblenz), Mosel and Saar.
In preperation for a cycling trip along the length of the Rhein I purchased this book for use as a resource to guide me through my journey.
While I thought this would be a great travel tool I had no idea how much insight it would provide in the way of history, culture, art and the sights the towns and villages along the river had to offer. While the Library Journal review expresses all of this, words alone can not describe what this book has to offer.

The Rhine

This book is well worth the cost. It gives great current information, detail and pictures of various Rhine River destinations with their history. The only downside is this book is heavy. I think you would call this book a "Coffee Table Book". Buy it anyway, you won't be disappointed.

Rival Enlightenments is a very difficult read. Yet the timely urgency of our so-called civilization's need for civility merits a five star rating. With nuance build upon nuance, references going back and forth, the author's writing often expresses with startling clarity a truly historic critique of religion as an idolatrous metaphysics, religious faith becoming faith in reason, faith in the rational autonomy of the human person.

Although the author does not discuss a postmodern concern with the otherness of others, his discussion of civil philosophy represents a seminal context for the a postmodernist deconstruction of both premodern institutional authority and the hyperindividualism of modernity.

Nevertheless, an arduous task remains: how does our recognition and acknowledgement of the otherness of one another enable and empower us to nurture and cultivate a civil society that mediates relationships between the human person and the nation state? How to we nurture and cultivate civility in a mass mediated globalized market state?

I found Hunter's book to be a real eye-opener. Its ambition is nothing less than to provide a new interpretation of early modern German intellectual history, with profound consequences for our understanding of Kant in particular. Hunter's own statement of his aims - to reinstate the marginalised tradition of civil philosophy - may seem modest enough. But once it becomes clear that this cannot be done without overturning the whole 'progressivist' tradition of philosophical history leading to Kant, then the scope of the book becomes apparent. On my reading, Rival Enlightenments is based around two main ideas. First, that philosophies make more sense when seen in terms of the acts of self-transformation they require of their initiates. (Hunter has a sharp eye for the pedagogical pressure applied by philosophies extolling freedom!). Second, that early modern university metaphysics and civil philosophy were locked in deep rivalry over the best way to deal with confessional division and the wars of religion. (Anyone provoked by Rorty's and Rawls' arguments on why liberal states should not ground themselves in metaphysics will find much of interest in Hunter's exciting historical discussion of this problem). As a result of this reframing, the currently obscured civil philosophers - Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius - become much more central, as they provide the intellectual architecture for a secularised civil world. Kant, though, appears as the modern inheritor of a university metaphysics bent on making the civil world more moral than is good for it. While challenging to read, this book is one of the most intellectually exciting ones I have come across in a long time.