Who owns the street? Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence. The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse. Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania.

On April 16th, 1945 the Red Army launched their fourth largest offensive along the Eastern Front during World War II. The objective was to seize Berlin before the Western Allies.Sixteen days later, the former capital of the Third Reich fell to the conquering armies of Generals Georgi Zhukov and his rival Ivan Koniev. The cost to capture the largest urban complex on mainland Europe from a handful of understrength Heer and Waffen-SS divisions, supported by Volkssturm and Hitlerjugend formations armed mainly with Panzerfaust anti-armour rockets, was exceptionally high. The Red Army suffered more casualties among its soldiers than during the six month siege of Stalingrad, and it lost more armoured vehicles than during the Battle of Kursk.Total losses among the defenders and civilian population remain unknown. Central Berlin was left a wasteland. The scars of the street fighting are still visible today, seventy-five years after the battle.When Bloody Streets was first published in 2008 it detailed the tactical street fighting in Berlin day-by-day for the first time through vivid first person accounts and period aerial imagery of the city. Ten years later this ground breaking study is back in print completely revised. Previously unpublished first person accounts from both the German and Soviet perspectives supplement archival documents that include new data from the operational war diaries of the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts. The book is highly illustrated throughout with period images of the city, aerial overviews, and wartime photos.Building on more than 15 years of research, the second edition of Bloody Streets is a capstone to the author's prior works on the final climatic battles along the Eastern Front. It will remain a benchmark study of the Battle of Berlin for years to come.

The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich. The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe’s historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come. The Last Battle is Cornelius Ryan’s compelling account of this final battle, a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.” The Last Battle is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.

Urban Transformations is a theoretical and empirical account of the changing nature of urbanization in Germany. Where city planners and municipal administrations had emphasized free markets, the rule of law, and trade in 1871, by the 1930s they favoured a quite different integrative, corporate, and productivist vision. Urban Transformations explores the broad-based social transformation connected to these changes and the contemporaneous shifts in the cultural and social history of global capitalism. Dynamic features of modern capitalist life, such as rapid industrialization, working-class radicalism, dramatic population growth, poor quality housing, and regional administrative incoherence significantly influenced the Greater Berlin region. Examining materials on city planning, municipal administration, architecture, political economy, and jurisprudence, Urban Transformations recasts the history of German and European urbanization, as well as that of modernist architecture and city planning.

Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism. During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism. Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens—Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart. The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’ masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.

In noting that political violence was the product of choices made by political actors rather than the result of irresistible forces ...Schumann issues a pertinent warning while making a first-rate contribution to the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic. Central European History A well-documented and skillfully argued book. German Studies Review In his exceptional regional study of the Prussian province of Saxony, Schumann offers a richly detailed analysis of political violence in the Weimar Republic...This is a wordy but methodical and ultimately convincing work of scholarship. Choice Schumann ... calls into question some assumptions, provides interesting nuances, and helps to refine our understanding of the nature of political violence in Weimar Germany. Journal of Modern History ... provides a well-documented, solid narrative and challenging analysis of Weimar's political violence... American Historical Review This] definitive work, rich in source material and analysis, dispels stereotypes of political violence in the Weimar Republic. Historische Zeitschrift The Prussian province of Saxony-where the Communist uprising of March 1921 took place and two Combat Leagues (Wehrverb nde) were founded (the right-wing Stahlhelm and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner) - is widely recognized as a politically important region in this period of German history. Using a case study of this socially diverse province, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of political violence in Weimar Germany with particular emphasis on the political culture from which it emerged. It refutes both the claim that the Bolshevik revolution was the prime cause of violence, and the argument that the First World War's all-encompassing "brutalization" doomed post-1918 German political life from the very beginning. The study thus contributes to a view of the Weimar Republic as a state in severe crisis but with alternatives to the Nazi takeover. Dirk Schumann is Professor of History at Georg-August University, G ttingen. He is the co-editor of Life After Death (2003), Violence and Society after the First World War (first issue of Journal of Modern European History 2003]), Between Mass Death and Individual Loss (2007). Most recently, he has edited Raising Citizens in the "Century of the Child" The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (2010).

In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War-and more perilous. It was in that hot summer that the Berlin Wall was constructed, which would divide the world for another twenty-eight years. Then two months later, and for the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only yards apart. One mistake, one nervous soldier, one overzealous commander-and the tripwire would be sprung for a war that could go nuclear in a heartbeat. On one side was a young, untested U.S. president still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster and a humiliating summit meeting that left him grasping for ways to respond. It would add up to be one of the worst first-year foreign policy performances of any modern president. On the other side, a Soviet premier hemmed in by the Chinese, East Germans, and hardliners in his own government. With an all-important Party Congress approaching, he knew Berlin meant the difference not only for the Kremlin's hold on its empire-but for his own hold on the Kremlin. Neither man really understood the other, both tried cynically to manipulate events. And so, week by week, they crept closer to the brink. Based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh-sometimes startling-insights, written with immediacy and drama, Berlin 1961 is an extraordinary look at key events of the twentieth century, with powerful applications to these early years of the twenty-first. Includes photographs

Chronicles the events of 1916--a watershed year in the history of the small Canadian town known today as Kitchener, Ontario. The community, founded by German immigrants, was in turmoil over attempts to raise a battalion to support the British war effort, and that turmoil broke down the established order and culminated in the town's name change. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city. These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects. With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.

In August 1914, Berlin, Ontario, settled largely by people of German origin, was a thriving, peaceful city. By the spring of 1915 it was a city torn apart by the tensions of war. By September 1916, Berlin had become Kitchener. It began with the need to raise a battalion of 1,100 men to support the British war effort. Meeting with resistance from a peace-loving community and spurred on by the jingoistic nationalism that demanded troops to fight the hated “Hun,” frustrated soldiers began assaulting citizens in the streets and, on one infamous occasion, a Lutheran clergyman in his parsonage. Out of this turmoil arose a movement to rid the city of its German name, and this campaign, together with the recruiting efforts, made 1916 the most turbulent year in Kitchener’s history. This is the story of the men and women involved in these battles, the soldiers, the civic officials, the business leaders, and the innocent bystanders, and how they behaved in the face of conditions they had never before experienced.