A gripping account of a nation’s experiment in democracy.
A vivid history of Germany after its defeat in World War I.
German journalist Jähner, author of Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, reminds readers that the 1918 surrender came as a terrible shock to a people largely untouched by the war whose distant army was retreating but still in good order. Most soldiers were happy to go home, but a minority enjoyed being “proud warriors” and despised the disorderly democracy that had replaced the Kaiser only slightly less than German communists, who were anxious to join the Bolshevik revolution in progress across the border. There followed several years of murderous instability, economic upheaval, and failed coups before Germany achieved a measure of stability. Communists and extreme-right parties joined the government. Both exerted a malign influence, hated democracy, and proclaimed that a government cabal had betrayed the nation in 1918. Despite this dismal landscape, the 1920s featured a golden age of art and a revolution in lifestyles. Readers seeking an overall history of this era should consult Eric D. Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Jähner does not ignore politics, but mostly this is an outstanding cultural history. “The gender debates about LGBT+ are by no means an original development of the early twenty-first century; they had a massive prelude a hundred years ago,” writes the author, who also offers useful insights on literature, dancing, architecture and design, automobiles and city traffic, cinema, fashion, and even hairstyles. One dismal legacy of the Weimar era is hatred of the government, which, perhaps as a consequence, did not attract outstanding leaders. Jähner’s final chapters on the depression years reveal a democracy quietly dying. By 1933, the Nazis were Germany’s largest political party, and its takeover was peaceful and entirely legal.
A gripping account of a nation’s experiment in democracy.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781541606203
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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