Young Germany explores the revolt of the younger generation in Germany from 1896 to 1933. It is a readable history of the Free Youth Movement, one of the most significant factors in shaping modern Germany. Laqueur, who grew up in Germany, retraces the history of the movement, its central ideas, and its cultural background.Today his study is of even greater interest and importance than when it was first published in 1962. In his new introduction to this edition, Laqueur shows that the German Youth Movement can be seen as a precursor of contemporary youth revolt. It inspired all of the ideas which continue to preoccupy proponents and students of generational conflict today.

Historical essays on German mass politics, from novel and sometimes surprising viewpoints.

The Young Karl Marx is an innovative and important study of Marx's early writings. These writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but they also present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works. An erudite yet accessible discussion of Marx's influences and targets frames the author's critical engagement with Marx's account of the emergence, character, and (future) replacement of the modern state. This combination of historical and analytical approaches results in a sympathetic, but not uncritical, exploration of such fundamental themes as alienation, citizenship, community, anti-semitism, and utopianism. The Young Karl Marx is a scholarly and original work which provides a radical and persuasive reinterpretation of Marx's complex and often misunderstood views of German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing.

First published in 1962, this book examines Germany’s Free Youth Movement, a revolt of the younger generation in Germany from 1896 to 1933. This movement was one of the most significant factors in shaping modern Germany. Laqueur, who grew up in Germany, retraces the history of the movement, its central ideas, and its cultural background. He begins with its origins in 19th century, and goes on to examine the Jewish question, before moving on to the movement’s roots in Germany around the time of the rise of National Socialism in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. This book inspires all the ideas which continue to preoccupy proponents and students of generational conflict today.

This book engages with debates on ethnic minority and Muslim young people showing, beyond apathy and violent political extremism, the diverse forms of political engagement in which young people engage.

The Green Party evolved out of a number of protest movements of the late 1960s and 1970s and became a major political factor in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1983 when it drew enough votes to send twenty-seven members to the Bundestag. The author follows the party’s rise from new social and ecological groups to its current place in the Federal parliament and provincial legislatures. He addresses the questions raised by Green Party members and by the unrest they have engendered—whether they believe in parliamentary democracy, what effect their policy of replacing delegates in parliament at midsession will have on the parliament and the party, and how they relate to Germany’s traditional political parties. The answers to these and other questions form the background for an appraisal of the Green party in which the author traces the development of its role from a political irritant to a factor of serious influence.

Using German political parties as a prism with which to view institutional change, this collection transcends a single country focus and places the German experience in a comparative and historical framework. Evaluation the performance of the German parties and party system in dealing with problems of integration and legitimation common to all industrialized democracies, it presents a sharp analysis of the effects and incompleteness of German unification.

This book gives up-to-date assessments of key trends and issues in the Federal Republic with sufficient background analysis to make the treatment of the various topics accessible to those without detailed prior knowledge of German politics.

While we now have a great number of testimonials to the horrors of the Holocaust from survivors of that dark episode of twentieth-century history, rare are the accounts of what growing up in Nazi Germany was like for people who were reared to think of Adolf Hitler as the savior of his country, and rarer still are accounts written from a female perspective. Ursula Mahlendorf, born to a middle-class family in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, was the daughter of a man who was a member of the SS at the time of his early death in 1935. For a long while during her childhood she was a true believer in Nazism—and a leader in the Hitler Youth herself. This is her vivid and unflinchingly honest account of her indoctrination into Nazism and of her gradual awakening to all the damage that Nazism had done to her country. It reveals why Nazism initially appealed to people from her station in life and how Nazi ideology was inculcated into young people. The book recounts the increasing hardships of life under Nazism as the war progressed and the chaos and turmoil that followed Germany’s defeat. In the first part of this absorbing narrative, we see the young Ursula as she becomes an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and then goes on to a Nazi teacher-training school at fifteen. In the second part, which traces her growing disillusionment with and anger at the Nazi leadership, we follow her story as she flees from the Russian army’s advance in the spring of 1945, works for a time in a hospital caring for the wounded, returns to Silesia when it is under Polish administration, and finally is evacuated to the West, where she begins a new life and pursues her dream of becoming a teacher. In a moving Epilogue, Mahlendorf discloses how she learned to accept and cope emotionally with the shame that haunted her from her childhood allegiance to Nazism and the self-doubts it generated.