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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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