A timely, dramatic biography that explores how Hannah Arendt's personal experience shaped her indispensable work on totalitarianism, refugees and the nature of love and evil Hannah Arendt lived through the darkest of times; she made it her life's work to illuminate them. Interrogated in Hitler's Germany and held at an internment camp in occupied France, she bore direct witness to some of the most catastrophic events of 20th-century history. In her indispensable writings, Arendt approached ...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.The Holocaust, in which 11 million people died, was the largest atrocity of the 20th century and perhaps the hardest to understand. Approximately 6 million Jews and 5 million others including Roma people, Poles, Russian prisoners of war, political prisoners, homosexuals, people of colour, Jehovah's Witnesses, and various other minorities were first persecuted and then murdered.How, both morally and logistically, had this...

Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of her time, famous for her idea of "the banality of evil" which continues to provoke debate. This collection provides new and startling insight into Arendt's thoughts about Watergate and the nature of American politics, about totalitarianism and history, and her own experiences as an émigré.Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is an extraordinary portrait of one of the twentieth century's ...

In Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum investigates the meanings and motivations people have attached to Hitler and his crimes against humanity. What does Hitler tell us about the nature of evil? In often dramatic encounters, Rosenbaum confronts historians, scholars, filmmakers, and deniers as he skeptically analyzes the key strains of Hitler interpretation.A balanced and thoughtful overview of a subject both frightening and profound, this is an extraordinary quest, an expedit...

“A Nazi resistance story like none you’ve ever heard or read.” —Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and On Desperate Ground**"Every page is gripping, and the amount of new research is nothing short of mind-boggling. A brilliant book for the ages!” —Douglas Brinkley, author of American MoonshotA Stonewall Honor Book in NonfictionLonglisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction**Paper Bullets

In this brilliant, strikingly original book, historian John Lukacs delves to the core of Adolf Hitler's life and mind by examining him through the lenses of his surprisingly diverse biographers.Since 1945 there have been more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, and countless other books on him and the Third Reich. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Dangerously, the cumulative portrait that begins to emerge can suggest the face of a myt...

Hitler's autobiographical book Mein Kampf, the official doctrine of the NAZI regime during WWII, is not a book that many would consider to read. Modern society is generally very well acquainted with Hitler and the ultimate outcome of his philosophical stances and will automatically denounce such notions based on a purely humanitarian and moral standpoint. The book remains illegal in many parts of the world (particularly Europe) and it rightfully considered one of the most powerful, destruc...

From award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new research and full access to its subject’s papers, Koestler is the definitive account of this fascinating and polarizing figure. Though best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon

Two titans of twentieth-century thought: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics.Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble man’s existence in relation to death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis.Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a d...

More Americans claim ancestry from Germany than from any other nation. We speak a Germanic language, and from fairy tales to Freud, were surrounded by German influences. Yet America has lost touch with its German heritage. We simply cant fathom how the land of Beethoven and Goethe could have been responsible for WW II and the Holocaust. In The German Puzzle the author recounts his own journey of rediscovery. Drawing on a unique mix of personal and family experienceranging from schoolyard f...

A conversation between Elie Wiesel and Jorge Semprún about what they experienced and observed during their time in the Buchenwald concentration camp.On March 1, 1995, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, ARTE—a French-German state-funded television network—proposed an encounter between two highly regarded figures of our time: Elie Wiesel and Jorge Semprún. These two men had probably crossed paths—without ever mee...

Unlock the more straightforward side of The World of Yesterday with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, the author’s autobiography and a masterful depiction of the changes wrought by the two world wars in Europe. Zweig grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna at a time when the city was at the heart of a vast centuries-old empire and the cul...