Schreiben, Wie Es Wirklich War: Aufzeichnungen Karl Dürkefäldens aus den Jahren 1933-1945
Diary excerpts from a German white-collar worker in a small town who out of relentless curiosity collected and recorded details about the ease of Hitler's consolidation of power, about the pogrom of November 1938 and the wartime atrocities against Jews, Poles and Russians. A telling witness to Richard von Weizsäcker's insistence that all Germans knew something of the persecution of their Jewish neighbors and of wartime atrocities. Disturbing in its very simplicity.
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The Afghanistan crisis has dramatized and intensified antecedent changes and strains in the Western alliance. There was unanimous, if separate, condemnation of Soviet aggression, but there were also divergent, and often acrimoniously divergent, assessments of the causes of aggression and the nature of the challenge. The difficulties of orchestrating a common response or of at least preventing a discordant one suggest a new balance of forces within the alliance and a set of divergent interests.
Daniel Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust--condemning the German "eliminationist" mindset toward Jews--has become an international bestseller and a datum in German-American relations. Pity, because it is a simplistic, monocausal, and unhistorical explanation of one of the most complex horrors in history. For Goldhagen, as for the Nazis, Hitler is Germany.
German history teaches that malice and simplicity have their appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable. It also proves that democratic reconstruction is possible, even on initially uncongenial ground.

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