The Fall of Berlin 1945
Beevor is one of the finest narrative military historians now writing. Like his previous accounts of the siege of Stalingrad and the Crete campaign in 1941, this is a gripping read, rooted in archival research, weaving together all levels of war, from the strategic to the tactical. There is nothing really new in his discoveries about the ferocity and costliness of the fighting, the horrors of rape, or the madness of the Fuhrer in his bunker. But the tale lies in the telling, and there are none better.
Related
Germans always knew that their foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, had been a leftist activist in the 1960s and 1970s. More controversial were recent disclosures that he had once assaulted a police officer and may have had links to terrorists. Fischer's evolution is the tale of a generation that changed Germany -- and then itself.
In 1990, East Germany's ex-communists appeared to be in the political dustbin. Today, they are serious rivals of Germany's mainstream parties in the country's eastern states. The surprising rise of the Party of Democratic Socialism is a story of how a controversial political force took its own path toward normalization.
The aims of German foreign policy are three and inseparable: to preserve peace, to defend the freedom of the country and to restore German unity by peaceful means. None of them should be pursued at the cost of neglecting either of the others.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.