George L. Mosse

"The Second World War surpassed all previous wars in the sheer cost of many millions of lives, the majority of them civilian. It left a world reeling from physical destruction on a scale never experience before or since, and from the psychological traumas of loss, of imprisonment and genocide, and permanent exile from home.". "In this short book, Joanna Bourke turns an unblinking eye on the events and outcomes in the vast number of places where the war was fought: throughout Western and Central Europe, on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, in the Pacific, in Africa, in Asia. She shows where the strategic decisions came from and how they were implemented. In addition to the facts of this global conflict, she details the human, individual cost. Through diary entries and recorded oral history, we experience how ordinary people felt when they witnessed or heard of events, from the declaration of war on the radio to the mass murders carried out by Nazi soldiers in Russian villages." "Our understanding of the past conflict and our own age of violence and human atrocity into which the Second World War thrust us will be greatly enhanced by the scope and detail of this book."--BOOK JACKET.

"Writing about the events of his life through a historian's lens, Mosse gives us a personal history of our century, including his encounters with Carl Jung, Martin Buber, Albert Speer, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others among the famous and infamous. This is a story told with the clarity, passion, and verve that entranced thousands of Mosse's students and that countless readers have found, and will continue to find, in his many scholarly books."--BOOK JACKET.

Traces the relationship between nationalist ideology and the normative manners, morals, and sexuality of modern Europe which emerged at the end of the 18th century. Discusses the view that "outsiders"--Homosexual, insane, criminal, or Jewish - were abnormal, and the equation of racial degeneracy with sexual degeneracy. Some homosexuals, wishing to prove their masculinity, attacked Jews and embraced racism. In Weimar Germany, sexual decadence was blamed on the Jews. Ch. 7 (p. 133-152) deals with the relationship between sexuality and antisemitism in Germany and in Nazi thought.

In his classic study of the idealogical sources of National Socialism, George L. Mosse explores a unique complex of anti-democratic ideas deeply embedded in German history. He traces these currents of thought though the 19th and 20th centuries to show how a peculiarly Germanic ideology became institutionalized in the schools, youth movements, veterans' groups and political parties, and how the "German revolution" called for by the ideology's exponents was transformed by Hitler into an "anti-Jewish revolution," and an effective political program as the Nazis rose to power.

What was life like under the Third Reich? What went on between parents and children? What were the prevailing attitudes about sex, morality, religion? How did workers perceive the effects of the New Order in the workplace? What were the cultural currents -- in art, music, science, education, drama, and on the radio? Professor Mosse has recaptured the texture of life and thought using selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public announcements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors to describe National Socialism in practice and what it meant for the average German. - Back cover.