Books
Who are the losers now?
Keith Lowe’s horrifying book is a survey of the physical and moral breakdown of Europe in the closing months of the second world war and its immediate aftermath. It is… Read more
Charming, cold-eyed cosmopolitan
At last a diary as penetrating on Berlin as the Goncourt brothers’ on Paris has been translated into English. The author, Count Harry Kessler, resembled a character from Sybille Bedford’s… Read more
Anglo-Saxon divide
Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of… Read more
What was it like at the time?
At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to… Read more
Goodbye to Berlin
Peter Parker is beguiled by a novel approach to the lives of Europe’s intellectual elite in flight from Nazi Germany In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s… Read more
A conflict of loyalty
What was life like in Hitler’s Germany? This question has long fascinated authors and readers alike, as books like Alone in Berlin, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and The… Read more
Pastures new
On 20 September 1949, five days after his election as Chancellor of the newly created German Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer addressed the Bundestag: ‘Much unhappiness and much damage’, he told… Read more
Land of poets and thinkers
The reason Peter Watson gives for writing this long intellectual history of Germany since 1750 is a convincing one: that British obsession with Nazism has blinded many British people to… Read more
What we did to them . . .
The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. The perception of… Read more
Blow-out in Berlin
D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little was an unusual Man Booker winner (2003). Not only… Read more
The threat of holy war
John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a… Read more
The sound of eternity
The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. The Ninth is not necessarily Beethoven’s greatest symphony. That honour is surely shared by the Eroica, in which the composer changed the… Read more
An affable tour guide
In mentioning Heinrich the Fowler, 10th-century King of the Germans and one of the many obscure figures who appears in his book, Simon Winder describes a painting in the Hall… Read more
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