From extensive research, including a remarkable interview with the unrepentant chief of Hitler’s Women’s Bureau, this book traces the roles played by women – as followers, victims and resisters – in the rise of Nazism. Originally publishing in 1987, it is an important contribution to the understanding of women’s status, culpability, resistance and victimisation at all levels of German society, and a record of astonishing ironies and paradoxical morality, of compromise and courage, of submission and survival.
The acclaimed second collection of poetry by Patricia Lockwood, Booker Prize finalist author of the novel No One Is Talking About This and the memoir Priestdaddy SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * The Boston Globe * Powell’s * The Strand * Barnes & Noble * BuzzFeed * Flavorwire “A formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.” – The New York Times Book Review Colloquial and incantatory, the poems in Patricia Lockwood’s second collection address the most urgent questions of our time, like: Is America going down on Canada? What happens when Niagara Falls gets drunk at a wedding? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Why isn’t anyone named Gary anymore? Did the Hatfield and McCoy babies ever fall in love? The steep tilt of Lockwood’s lines sends the reader snowballing downhill, accumulating pieces of the scenery with every turn. The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.
From the bestselling author of Agent Zigzag and Double Cross the true story of Friedrich Nietzsche's bigoted, imperious sister who founded a 'racially pure' colony in Paraguay together with a band of blond-haired fellow Germans.
“Beautiful and heartrending” fiction set in Vietnam and America from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker) In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Viet Thanh Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. This incisive collection by the National Book Award finalist and celebrated author of The Committed gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her with a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of migration. “Terrific.” —Chicago Tribune “An important and incisive book.” —The Washington Post “An urgent, wonderful collection.” —NPR
From the internationally bestselling author of The German Girl, an unforgettable, “searing” (People) saga exploring a hidden piece of World War II history and the lengths a mother will go to protect her children—perfect for fans of Lilac Girls, We Were the Lucky Ones, and The Alice Network. Seven decades of secrets unravel with the arrival of a box of letters from the distant past, taking readers on a harrowing journey from Nazi-occupied Berlin, to the South of France, to modern-day New York City. Berlin, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the South of France. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape and there, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Once in Haute-Vienne, her brief respite is interrupted by the arrival of Nazi forces, and Amanda finds herself in a labor camp where she must once again make a heroic sacrifice. New York, 2015. Eighty-year-old Elise Duval receives a call from a woman bearing messages from a time and country that she forced herself to forget. A French Catholic who arrived in New York after World War II, Elise is shocked to discover that the letters were from her mother, written in German during the war. Her mother’s words unlock a floodgate of memories, a lifetime of loss un-grieved, and a chance—at last—for closure. Based on true events and “breathtakingly threaded together from start to finish with the sound of a beating heart” (The New York Times Book Review), The Daughter’s Tale is an unforgettable family saga of love, survival, and redemption.
Bad Faith tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and 'Commissioner for Jewish Affairs', who dissembled his way to power in the Vichy government and was responsible for sending thousands of children to the gas chambers. After the war he left France, never to be brought to justice. Early on in his career Louis married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne whom they abandoned in England. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. In Carmen Callil's masterful, elegiac and sometimes darkly comic account, Darquier's rise during the years leading up to the Second World War mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism. Epic, haunting, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
Set against the backdrop of WWII Germany and spanning thirteen years from 1940 to 1953, SURVIVING THE FATHERLAND tells the true stories of a girl and a boy struggling with the terror-filled reality of life in the Third Reich, each embarking on their own dangerous path toward survival, freedom, and ultimately each other.
THIS IS the story of the search for “Faceless Fritz”—the most difficult and frightening camera-hunt ever undertaken by ace photographer-reporter Margaret Bourke-White. “Fearless Fritz” was cable shorthand for one of several LIFE assignments that brought Miss Bourke-White and her camera to Germany some months before its fall. She was to pin down the private German citizens—to find out what kind of human being it was who, multiplied by millions, made up the Nazi terror. Was he cruel? Was he a villain? Or was he a jolly, gemutlich, beer-drinking, music-loving sentimentalist so many of us remembered, who had really been helpless in the power of a small gang of madmen? By the time Margaret Bourke-White arrived in Germany on this mission, she had seen much death and danger. She had been in Moscow during its fiercest bombings. In Italy she had come closer to the enemy lines than any American woman before her. But it was in Germany that cold horror overtook her. The Germany that Miss Bourke-White saw and recorded in this book puts to shame Dali’s most grotesque nightmares. It is a physical and spiritual chamber of horrors, a cuckoo-cloud land whose inhabitants live in a lost dream. They are the people whose faces are as usual and recognizable as neighbors’, but whose reactions do not seem to make sense. “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly,” which was first published in 1946, takes its title from the words of the anthem, “Die Wacht am Rhein,” to which German soldiers have marched three times in the memory of many now living. It brings new light to bear on the German people—in the hope that through a more immediate understanding of them, a fourth march may be averted... Richly illustrated throughout with 128 of her photographs, with detailed captions, forming an integral part of Margaret Bourke-White’s important report on conquered Germany.
Poland, 1939. A country, torn by the occupation of two unlikely allies - Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. On the border of this newly divided territory, a young Wehrmacht Unteroffizier, Werner and a Soviet Military Interpreter, Kira meet and fall in love against all odds. Both forced into the military against their will, they wish for one thing only - a peaceful life together. Everything is set for Kira to defect and marry Werner... But the German army invades the Soviet Union, and now the two lovers are forced to fight against each other on the opposite sides of the frontline; trying to keep their humanity as more and more atrocities are committed by both armies. They have to decide if their love is stronger than the devastation surrounding them or succumb to the hate as sworn enemies should. Partially based on true events, this novel will take you on the unforgettable journey through war-torn countries, where hope can be lost in no-man's-land, and one will have to go to great lengths not to lose sight of it.
