1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910163944203321

Autore

Fritzsche Peter <1959->

Titolo

An iron wind : Europe under Hitler / / Peter Fritzsche

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Basic Books, , [2016]

ISBN

1-5416-9761-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xviii, 356 pages)

Classificazione

HIS037070

Disciplina

940.534

Soggetti

Violence - Social aspects - Europe - History - 20th century

War and society - Europe - History - 20th century

Civilians in war - Europe - History - 20th century

World War, 1939-1945 - Social aspects - Europe

World War, 1939-1945 - Europe

World War, 1939-1945 - Occupied territories

World War, 1939-1945

Electronic books.

Europe Social conditions 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Talk in Wartime -- Hitler Means War! -- A New Authoritarian Age? -- Living with the Germans -- Journey to Russia -- The Fate of the Jews -- The Life and Death of God -- The Destruction of Humanity -- Broken Words.

Sommario/riassunto

"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation, mass executions, and genocide. As direct targets of and witnesses to violence, rather than far-off bystanders, civilians were forced to face the war head on. Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, fiction, and other first-person accounts, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche redefines our understanding of



the civilian experience of war across the vast territory occupied and threatened by Nazi Germany. Amid accumulating horrors, ordinary people across Europe grappled with questions of faith and meaning, often reaching troubling conclusions. World War II exceeded the human capacity for understanding, and those men and women who lived through it suspected that language could not adequately register the horrors they saw and experienced. But it nevertheless prompted an outpouring of writing, as people labored to comprehend and piece thoughts into philosophy. Their broken words are all we have to reconstruct how contemporaries saw the war around them, how they failed to see its terrible violence in full, and how they attempted to translate the destruction into narratives. Carefully reading these testimonies as no historian has done before, Fritzsche's groundbreaking work sheds new light on the most violent conflict in human history, when war made words inadequate, and the inadequacy of words heightened the devastation of war"--