Berlin, in May 1945: World War II is over in Europe. The Soviet army has conquered Berlin, a city reduced to rubble, and now under martial law, imposed by the victorious Communists. Soldiers from America, Great Britain, and France will move into Berlin a few months later. But now, broken tanks and makeshift barricades are littering the streets, tenements and churches are turned into bombed-out shells, tunnels are flooded and train tracks destroyed. German soldiers are been hauled off to POW-camps in Siberia, while old men are cutting up dead horses for food, women are trading clothing for survival, and children are left to their own devices in the ruins. And the victors, Russian soldiers of the Red Army, look as much exhausted as the defeated. These rare pictures have been taken by photographers of the Soviet Army and by Germans in their employ, among them Otto Donath, immediately after the surrender and in the months to follow. They are published for the first time in the United States, allowing a glimpse into an era of destruction and desperation, but also of survival and rebuilding. The text is by Michael Brettin, Ph.D., the photos were curated by Peter Kroh, both of them editors at Berliner Kurier. The preface was written by Stephen Kinzer, the former bureau chief of The New York Times in Berlin.   Dr. Michael Brettin, born 1964, studied History, Politics and Slavistics and graduated with a PhD in History from Hamburg University. He is also a graduate of the Hamburg School of Journalism, the Henri-Nannen-Schule. Currently, he works as a managing editor of the Sunday issue of Berliner Kurier.   Peter Kroh, born in 1950, has worked as a photo reporter for East German newspapers. In 1995, after the Wall had come down, he moved to Berlin to work for Berliner Kurier. Kroh became the photo editor of the paper. Today, he is retired.   Otto Donath worked as a photographer for the propaganda company of the Wehrmacht during WWII. After 1945, he took pictures first for the Soviet army, later for newspapers and magazines in East Berlin. He died in 1971 in Berlin.   Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries, mostly for the New York Times. Today, he is a visiting fellow at Brown University. His most recent book is "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War."   These photos depict a grotesque normalcy, beyond the well known iconography of heroic liberations and optimistic rebuilding. -Der Spiegel Online   At times eerie and at times prosaic, the photographs, many taken by victorious Soviet Red Army soldiers, show ordinary people doing extraordinary things in order to rebuild their lives, literally and figuratively, amid the ruins of a defeated city. -Jason Walsh, correspondent, Christian Science Monitor   These never-seen pictures of Berlin in ruins are so forceful, because for those Berliners, destruction was an everyday experience. This view of history does not leave anybody untouched. untouched. -Literaturmarktinfo.de   A veritable gold mine of historical and, above all, photographical treasures, with something for everyone in this book, and everything in it, from death to birth, from joy to sadness, from optimism to resignation. -Luke McCallin, author of The Man from Berlin.   We see it all: the unfathomable rubble, the homeless and the hungry, the German soldiers marched off to prison camps. And then: the beginnings of recovery and return of the human spirit. Even if you think you've seen it all before on the European war, Berlin 1945 is likely to surprise you. -Greg Mitchell, The Nation magazine, and author of Hiroshima in America

Berlin 1945. World War II: Photos of the Aftermath

Arts & Photography

Brettin, Michael

Photography & Video

Berlinica

Berlin! Berlin! is a satirical selection from the man with the "acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy,” as New York author and Tucholsky-expert Peter Wortsman writes. This book os a complete collection of Tucholsky’s news stories, features, satirical pieces, and poems about his hometown Berlin. It depicts Weimar Berlin, its cabarets, its policies, its follies, its ticks, and its celebrities, such as Pola Negri, Claire Waldoff, Bertold Brecht, Max Reinhardt, or Heinrich Zille. The book contains some of Tucholsky’s most famous pieces, among them Berlin! Berlin!, a feature of the stereotypical Berliner on the phone, on vacation or doing “bizness”, more than one satirical biography of the author himself, and some of his most famed stories such as where the holes in the cheese come from, or about the lion who escaped the Berlin zoo. Herr Wendriner, the chatty Berlin businessman makes an appearance, as well as Lottchen, the flapper, modelled after one of Tucholsky’s real-life gilrfriends. Also Tucholsky’s long-term friends Karlchen and Jakopp are part of this book, 
 The foreword was written by Anne Nelson, the author of “The Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler”. Ian King, the distinguished chair of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Society and a former professor of German in London and Sheffield, who wrote his Ph. D. on Tucholsky and is the co-editor of Volume 3 of Tucholsky’s Complete Works provided a biographical introduction. “His writings still have lessons for us today,” King writes, “that a man who might have preferred to write idylls, humorous pieces and unpolitical verse instead devoted his life to fighting against injustice and arguing passionately against the addiction to military uniforms which afflicted too many of his compatriots.” 
 Peter Schneider, the author of the Berlin novel "Walljumper" writes about this book: “Kurt Tucholsky was one of the most brilliant German-Jewish writers and satirists of his time. He had to leave his beloved Berlin because of his biting, witty stories against militarism and Nazi Fascism. Today’s Berliners adore him as one of the greatest sons of this city. The world has yet to discover his genius.” This collection of Tucholsky’s stories, with many pictures of the old and the new Berlin has never been published in America—or in English—before. This book will hopefully help to rediscover the famed writer in the United States. 
 Kurt Tucholsky's Berlin Stories is a book by Berlinica Publishing LLC, a multi-media publishing house based in New York City. Berlinica offers English-language books from Berlin, German; fiction, non-fiction, travel guides, history about the Wall and the Third Reich, Jewish life, art, architecture and photography, as well as books about nightlife, cookbooks, and maps. It also offers documentaries and feature films on DVD, as well as music CDs. Berlinica caters to history buffs, Americans of German heritage, travelers, and artists and young people who love the cutting-edge city in the heart of Europe. Berlinica cooperates with Berlin-based publishing houses and tourist organizers. 
 Berlinica's titles include "The Berlin Wall Today," a full-color guide to the remnants of the Wall, "Wallflower," a novel by New-York-born writer Holly-Jane Rahlens; "Berlin For Free," a guide to everything free in Berlin for the frugal traveler by Monica Maertens; "Berlin in the Cold War," about post-World War II history and the Wall, "The Berlin Cookbook," a full-color collection of traditional German recipes by Rose Marie Donhauser, the music CD "Berlin—mon amour," by chanteuse Adrienne Haan, and two documentaries on DVD, "The Red Orchestra," by Berlin-born artist Stefan Roloff and "The Path to Nuclear Fission," by New York filmmaker Rosemarie Reed. Berlinica also sells "Stadtführer to Hitler's Berlin", a bi-langual color picture book.

Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches From The Weimar Republic, Berlin Stories from the Golden Twenties. (Kurt Tucholsky in Translation)

Humor & Entertainment

Kurt Tucholsky

Humor

A representative selection from the man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy, who was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as Georg Grosz was its face. Kurt Tucholsky was a brilliant reporter, satirist, poet, lyricist, and storyteller of the Weimar Republic, a pacifist and a democrat; a fighter, lady's man, theater lover, political animal, and also an early warner against the Nazis. They hated and loathed Tucholsky, and drove him out of his country. The famed journalist became an outcast, an enemy of the state. His books were burned and banned in 1933, he died alone in Sweden. But he is not forgotten.With this extraordinary and also funny book, Tucholsky's work about his hometown Berlin is published for the first time in the United States.

Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches From The Weimar Republic. Berlin Stories from

Our West Berlin: Storybook From The Island

Blumenthal, Ralph

Rocking the Wall explores the epic Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin on July 19, 1988, and how it changed the world. Erik Kirschbaum spoke to scores of fans and concert organizers on both sides of the Berlin Wall, including Jon Landau, Springsteen's long-time friend and manager, to unearth this fascinating story. With lively behind-the-scenes details from eyewitness accounts, magazine and newspaper clippings, TV recordings, and even Stasi files, as well as photos and memorabilia, this gripping book transports you back in the middle of those heady times shortly before the Berlin Wall fell and gives you a front-row spot at one of the biggest and most exciting rock concerts ever, anywhere. It takes you to an unforgettable journey with Springsteen through the divided city, to his hotel, and his dressing room at the open air concert grounds in Weissensee, where The Boss, live on stage, delivered a courageous speech against the Wall to a record-breaking crowd of more than 300,000 delirious young East Germans full of joy and hope. Their thunderous reaction to his speech was so intense that it even briefly brought tears to Springsteen's eyes. And their tremendous, powerful cry for freedom became the "final nail in the coffin" of the Communist regime and subsequently helped fuel the uprising that brought down the Wall.

Rocking the Wall. Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World. The Untold Story How the Boss Played Behind the Iron Curtain

Biographies & Memoirs

Kirschbaum, Erik

Arts & Literature

Rocking the Wall explores the epic Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin on July 19, 1988, and how it changed the world. Erik Kirschbaum spoke to scores of fans and concert organizers on both sides of the Berlin Wall, including Jon Landau, Springsteen's long-time friend and manager, to unearth this fascinating story. With lively behind-the-scenes details from eyewitness accounts, magazine and newspaper clippings, TV recordings, and even Stasi files, as well as photos and memorabilia, this gripping book transports you back in the middle of those heady times shortly before the Berlin Wall fell and gives you a front-row spot at one of the biggest and most exciting rock concerts ever, anywhere. It takes you to an unforgettable journey with Springsteen through the divided city, to his hotel, and his dressing room at the open air concert grounds in Weissensee, where The Boss, live on stage, delivered a courageous speech against the Wall to a record-breaking crowd of more than 300,000 delirious young East Germans full of joy and hope. Their thunderous reaction to his speech was so intense that it even briefly brought tears to Springsteen's eyes. And their tremendous, powerful cry for freedom became the "final nail in the coffin" of the Communist regime and subsequently helped fuel the uprising that brought down the Wall.  Inside this book is as clear a statement of the power of this music as anyone, ever, has come up with." - Dave Marsh  "An illuminating and impressively detailed examination of a frequently overlooked moment in the nexus of rock music and political liberation. I learned a great deal and enjoyed doing so." -Eric Alterman    Erik Kirschbaum, a native of New York City and long-time Springsteen fan, has lived in Germany for more than twenty-five years and in Berlin since 1993. He is a correspondent for the Reuters international news agency and has written about entertainment, politics, sports, economics, as well as disasters and climate change in nearly thirty countries. He is a devoted father of four, an enthusiastic cyclist, a solar power entrepreneur and an unabashed crusader for renewable energy. Rocking the Wall is his third book.

Rocking the Wall. Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World. (Color Picture Bookstore Edition)

Erik Kirschbaum,Herbert Schulze

Rocking the Wall ist dem legendäre Bruce-Springsteen-Konzert in Ost-Berlin am 19. Juli 1988 gewidmet, das die Mauer erschütterte und die Welt veränderte. Erik Kirschbaum sprach mit dutzenden von Fans und mit Veranstaltern in Ost und West, darunter Jon Landau, Springsteens Manager und Freund. Er schildert Szenen hinter den Kulissen und Erinnerungen von Leuten, die dabei waren, er hat Presse und Fernseh-Aufzeichnungen ausgewertet und sogar die Bericht der Stasi, die das Konzert im Auge hatte. Das Buch begleitet den Leser auf eine unvergessliche Reise mit Springsteen durch die geteilte Stadt bis zum dem Open-Air-Gelände in Berlin-Weißensee, wo der Boss, auf der Bühne, eine mutige Rede gegen die Mauer hielt, während ihm eine alle Rekorde brechende Zuschauermenge von mehr als 300.000 begeisterten jungen Ostdeutschen zujubelte. “Dieses Buch belegt die Macht der Musik so klar wie niemals zuvor” – Dave Marsh, Musikkritiker des Rolling Stone  “Eine beeindruckend detaillierte Betrachtung eines kaum bekannten Zusammentreffens von Rockmusik und politischer Befreiung” – Eric Alterman, Autor von The Promise of Bruce Springsteen  “Der Boss inspirierte eine ganze Generation, für Freiheit zu kämpfen” David Crossland, Spiegel Online  “Dieses Buch  erzählt mit Akribi von Ereignissen hinter den Kulissen” Birgit Walter, Berliner Zeitung  “Springsteen ist immer noch bei uns—das Regime der DDR nicht”  Stephen Evans, BBC Kultur   “Für Springsteen war es ein Konzert, woran er sich immer erinnern würde”  Kate Connolly, The Guardian  “Der Moment, auf den manche von uns ein Leben lang gewartet hatten”  Michelle Martin, Washington Post

Rocking the Wall. Bruce Springsteen in Ost-Berlin 1988: Das Legendare Konzert (German Edition)

Herbert Schulze Erik Kirschbaum

Berlin Berlin English Edition Dispatches From The Weimar Republic Volume 1 Tucholsky In Translation

Mark Twain in Berlin Newly Discovered Stories & An Account of Twain's Berlin Adventures

Austilat, Andreas

TWAIN,MARK

Rocking The Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World. The Untold Story How the Boss Played Behind the Iron Curtain

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