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Richard Bessel

    Richard Bessel is een historicus gespecialiseerd in de sociale en politieke geschiedenis van modern Duitsland, met een bijzondere focus op de nasleep van de twee wereldoorlogen en de geschiedenis van de politie. Zijn werk duikt diep in de ingrijpende maatschappelijke en politieke gevolgen die voortvloeien uit belangrijke historische gebeurtenissen. Hij is momenteel Senior Fellow aan het Institute for Advanced Studies in Freiburg.

    Richard Bessel
    Life in the Third Reich
    Germany after the First World War
    Violence: A modern obsession
    Nazism and war
    Violence
    Germany 1945
    • Germany 1945

      • 522bladzijden
      • 19 uur lezen
      3,8(29)Tarief

      In the beginning of 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen. As many as a million people died violent deaths in January alone. That stark fact provides the starting point for this book, which examines Germany's emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; millions of survivors had lost their families, homes and health; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses. Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. This is the story of Germany in 1945, a story of life after death. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse, social disintegration, and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of war and total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on their own personal concerns. Germany's transition to a period of relative peace, prosperity and civilized behaviour is the hinge on which Europe's twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.

      Germany 1945
    • In Violence: A Modern Obsession, Professor Richard Bessel explores changing attitudes towards violence, focusing primarily on developments in twentieth-century Europe and North America. He does so by examining violent spectacle, political and revolutionary violence, the violence of war, violence and religion, as well as domestic violence, and then considers attempts to control violence and how it has been remembered and commemorated

      Violence
    • Nazism and war

      • 192bladzijden
      • 7 uur lezen
      3,8(116)Tarief

      As this book shows, Nazi ideology was based on two central beliefs: in war and race. Peace was merely a preparation for war, war which would redraw the racial map of Europe. The author begins with the aftermath of the First World War and the corrosive myth-building which substituted memories of senseless slaughter with the myth of a meaningful and even sacred event. It moves on steadily through the 1920s and the Nazi seizure of power, to the economic boom, massive rearmament and Jew-baiting of the 1930s. And then on to the war itself and the Nazis' racist war of extermination. The author pays particular attention to the chaos and extreme violence of the last months of the war, so catastrophic for the German people that they came to believe that they too had been victims of the war. Finally he describes the aftermath of the Second World War and the wreckage left behind by the Nazis which affected the lives of Germans and Europeans far beyond May 1945.

      Nazism and war
    • Germany after the First World War

      • 325bladzijden
      • 12 uur lezen
      3,5(33)Tarief

      A social history of Germany in the years following the First World War, this book explores Germany's defeat and the subsequent demobilization of its armies, events which had devastating social and psychological consequences for the nation. Bessel examines the changes brought by the War to Germany, including those resulting from the return of soldiers to civilian life and the effects of demobilization on the economy. He demonstrates that the postwar transition was viewed as a moral crusade by Germans desperately concerned about challenges to traditional authority; and he assesses the ways in which the experience of the War, and memories of it, affected the politics of the Weimar Republic. This is an original and scholarly book, which offers important insights into the sense of dislocation, both personal and national, experienced by Germany and Germans in the 1920s, and its damaging legacy for German democracy.

      Germany after the First World War
    • Even today, the Third Reich-the regime that instigated the most destructive war in modern history-evokes powerful images of fascination and horror. Yet how were the lives of the ordinary German people of the 1930s and '40s affected by the politics of Hitler and his followers? Looking beyond the catalog of events, this intriguing book reveals that daily German life involved a complex mixture of bribery and terror; of fear and concessions; of barbarism and appeals to conventional moral values employed by the Nazis to maintain their grip on society. Eight leading historians present essays that shed fresh light on topics as familiar as the role of political violence in Nazi seizure of power and the German view of Hitler himself. It also focuses on lesser-known aspects of life in the Third Reich, such as village life, the treatment of "social outcasts," and the Germans' own retrospective view of this period of their history.

      Life in the Third Reich
    • Patterns of Provocation

      • 153bladzijden
      • 6 uur lezen

      The aim of this volume is to redress this situation by probing, in depth, a limited number of incidents of public disorder and focusing particularly on the role of the police. In doing so, this collection will draw out general patterns of police provocation and public responses and suggest general hypotheses. schovat popis

      Patterns of Provocation
    • No failure in democratic history had such far reaching consequences as the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Recent debate has centered upon the viability of Weimar democracy and the inevitability of its failure in the context of insuperable economic problems. The papers presented here offer perspect

      Weimar: why did German democracy fail?
    • Grenzen der SED-Diktatur? Die unbegrenzte Herrschaft der SED, von Mauer, Stacheldraht, Schießbefehl und Stasi gestützt, war für die DDR doch gerade charakteristisch. Herrschafts- und Gestaltungsanspruch der Partei waren total, sie entschied und bestimmte in Politik, Wirtschaft, Recht, Verwaltung und Kultur. Trotzdem, auch im SED-Staat war die Reichweite der Herrschaft nicht grenzenlos. Das historische Erbe beispielsweise, das er gewollt oder ungewollt übernehmen mußte, begrenzte die diktatorischen Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten. Selbst die Mauer war ein Denkmal der Macht und der Ohnmacht zugleich. Familie, Kirche und Wissenschaft entzogen sich teilweise der totalitären Formierung. Ebenso überforderte sich die SED bei dem Bemühen, bis in die letzten Verästelungen hinein zu dirigieren, und stieß dabei an ihre Grenzen. Grenzen der Diktatur bedeutet nicht mehr politische Freiheit oder mehr Rechtsstaatlichkeit, und schon gar nicht soll das Regime bagatellisiert werden. Das Interesse, das alle Beiträge durchzieht, ist die Frage nach dem, was in der Gesellschaft der DDR in dem totalen Gestaltungsanspruch der SED nicht aufging. Diese Frage nach den Grenzen der Diktatur – vor allem in der Frühzeit der DDR – wird konkret gestellt und beantwortet. Das ist möglich, weil die Archive des SED-Staats in einem Umfang zugänglich geworden sind, der für die historische Erkenntnis ein Glücksfall ist. Die Probleme und Widersprüche der täglichen Praxis von Herrschaft, wie die Quellen sie zeigen, schärfen den Blick für die Grenzen dieser Herrschaft. Will man die gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit in der DDR erfassen, muß man beides sehen, Ausdehnung und Grenzen der Diktatur. Die Geschichte der DDR war mehr als die Geschichte unbegrenzter Herrschaft im Schutz einer Grenze aus Stacheldraht.

      Die Grenzen der Diktatur