Broken Lives

The gripping
stories of ordinary Germans who lived through World War II, the
Holocaust, and Cold War partition—but also recovery, reunification, and
rehabilitation
Broken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century
as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under
Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they
saw and did.
Drawing on six dozen memoirs by the generation of Germans born in the
1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people
who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust,
and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing
postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Written decades
after the events, these testimonies, many of them unpublished, look back
on the mistakes of young people caught up in the Nazi movement. In
many, early enthusiasm turns to deep disillusionment as the price of
complicity with a brutal dictatorship--fighting at the front, aerial
bombardment at home, murder in the concentration camps—becomes clear.
Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives
reveals the intimate human details of historical events and offers new
insights about persistent questions. Why did so many Germans support
Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi inhumanity? How did
they finally distance themselves from this racist dictatorship and come
to embrace human rights? Jarausch argues that this generation's focus on
its own suffering, often maligned by historians, ultimately led to a
more critical understanding of national identity—one that helped
transform Germany from a military aggressor into a pillar of European
democracy.
The result is a powerful account of the everyday experiences and
troubling memories of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and
out of the abyss of a dark century.