Turning Points in Modern Times: Essays on German and European History
Nineteen essays by the distinguished German scholar whose entire work exemplifies the unity of humanistic study. At once a historian and a political scientist, with a trained philosophic bent, Bracher has done more than any other German--and started earlier--to explicate the history and meaning of National Socialism. In these new essays he returns to an analysis of totalitarianism, to the challenges that faced democracy in the interwar years, and to the problems and possibilities of a democratic renaissance in Europe after 1989. A valuable work for an understanding in-depth of thought and politics in our century.
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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.
After 40 years of division, the two former halves of Germany are discovering the psychological stresses of unity. The collapse of the German Democratic Republic released East Germans from public control and authoritarian intimidation. But with freedom, they are having to learn to make choices and to live with risk and uncertainty. West Germans are resentful at the cost of reunification and arrogant about the sad state of their Eastlander brethren. Both halves of Germany will have to deal with their separate and joint pasts. They should expect moral and psychological unity to take longer than the material recuperation of the east.
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.
