The gripping stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War
II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition--but also recovery,
reunification, and rehabilitation
Broken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century as seen
through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and
whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and
did.
Drawing on six dozen memoirs by the generation of Germans born in the
1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people
who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust,
and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing
postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Written decades
after the events, these testimonies, many of them unpublished, look back
on the mistakes of young people caught up in the Nazi movement. In many,
early enthusiasm turns to deep disillusionment as the price of
complicity with a brutal dictatorship--fighting at the front, aerial
bombardment at home, murder in the concentration camps--becomes clear.
Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims,
Broken Lives reveals the intimate human details of historical events
and offers new insights about persistent questions. Why did so many
Germans support Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi
inhumanity? How did they finally distance themselves from this racist
dictatorship and come to embrace human rights? Jarausch argues that this
generation's focus on its own suffering, often maligned by historians,
ultimately led to a more critical understanding of national
identity--one that helped transform Germany from a military aggressor
into a pillar of European democracy.
The result is a powerful account of the everyday experiences and
troubling memories of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and
out of the abyss of a dark century.
