A vivid description of the authors first seventeen years of life encompassing Hitlers twelve-year regime. His Hitler Youth experience is typical for the average German boy of that time. His personal endurances are blended in with reports from the battlefield and the home front. Some of the Hitler Youth were chosen to be indoctrinated in the regimes elite schools and lived a privileged life of state-sponsored higher education. As war brings more hardships and the nation finds itself defeated and exposed to Soviet barbarism, the Hitler Youth force keeps on fighting with tenacious fanaticism to self destruction. Those of them that survived the war felt utterly betrayed and disillusioned. Their fallen comrades being Hitlers Last Victims.

A vivid description of the authors first seventeen years of life encompassing Hitlers twelve-year regime. His Hitler Youth experience is typical for the average German boy of that time. His personal endurances are blended in with reports from the battlefield and the home front. Some of the Hitler Youth were chosen to be indoctrinated in the regimes elite schools and lived a privileged life of state-sponsored higher education. As war brings more hardships and the nation finds itself defeated and exposed to Soviet barbarism, the Hitler Youth force keeps on fighting with tenacious fanaticism to self destruction. Those of them that survived the war felt utterly betrayed and disillusioned. Their fallen comrades being Hitlers Last Victims.

As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by the changing political, social and economic organization of the built environment. The book focuses on the visual culture of the city (architecture, memorials, photography and film). It argues that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in a contemporary 'overexposed' city, whose spatial and temporal boundaries have long since disintegrated.

Structures of Memory turns to the landscape of contemporary Berlin, particularly places marked by the presence of the Nazi regime, in order to understand how some places of great cruelty or great heroism are forgotten by all but eyewitnesses, while others become the site of public ceremonies, museums, or commemorative monuments.

Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the “New Berlin” is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany’s largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.

An innovative exploration of German memory, national identity, and modernity embodied in the public spaces of the new capital.

A revelatory history of the commemoration of the Berlin Wall and its significance in defining contemporary German national identity.