At the moment of the publication of this book 75 years have passed since the defeat and beginning of the occupation of Germany by the victorious Allies, and 30 years since the reunification of the country, within restricted boundaries, after 45 years of division. I was born in the New World 20 years after the end of the war, lived most of my youth with the reality of the division, and witnessed the whole reunification process, as a member of a family of German descent living outside Germany. My interest in the subject, plus several logical links to Germany, a vision "from abroad" and obviously my knowledge of German, helped me to start preparing in 1987, well before any possibility of reunification existed, a legal thesis which, unexpectedly, even for me, turned into reality with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification in 1990. I was able to deliver the final work, my professional thesis, personally into the hands of Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker during his state visit to Mexico in 1992. And shortly thereafter I received from him a very rewarding letter. But just now, after 30 years, I am able to publish in English this reworked and updated version of my original thesis, now as a history book. I have tried to condense and explain the facts of 45 years of division so Germans and foreigners can have a full and objective view of all the aspects -historical, political, territorial and legal alike- pertaining to the so-called "German Question" during the period 1945-1990. I hope you enjoy it

A brief history of Germany, Second edition provides a clear, lively, and comprehensive account of the history of Germany from ancient times to the present day.

* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).

Recent sociopolitical events have profoundly changed the status and functions of German and influenced its usage. In this study (published by Cambridge in 1984) Michael Clyne revises and expands his original analysis of the German language in Language and Society in the German-speaking Countries in the light of such changes as the end of the Cold War, German unification, the redrawing of the map of Europe, increasing European integration, and the changing self-images of Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. His discussion includes the differences in the form, function and status of the various national varieties of German; the relation between standard and non-standard varieties; gender, generational and political variation; Anglo-American influence on German; and the convergence of east and west. The result is a wide-ranging exploration of language and society in the German-speaking countries, all of which have problems or dilemmas concerning nationhood or ethnicity which are language-related and/or language-marked.

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.