The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism. While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies. A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possi

The Weimar Republic Sourcebook

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook is an exciting new collection of documents on the origins, rise, course and consequences of National Socialism, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Packed full of both official and private papers from the perspectives of perpetrators and victims, these sources offer a revealing insight into why Nazism came into being, its extraordinary popularity in the 1930s, how it affected the lives of people, and what it means to us today. This carefully edited series of 148 documents, drawn from 1850 to 2000, covers the pre-history and aftermath of Nazism: * the ideological roots of Nazism, and the First World War * the Weimar Republic * the consolidation of Nazi power * Hitler's motives, aims and preparation for war * the Second World War * the Holocaust * the Cold War and recent historical debates. The Nazi Germany Sourcebook focuses on key areas of study, helping students to understand and critically evaluate this extraordinary historical episode: