Full AspenCat Catalog

"Checkpoint Charlie is the story of the men and women - from both sides of the Cold War's political divide - who lived, served on, or escaped through the Berlin Wall during its life span (13th August 1961 - 9th November 1989). This physical monstrosity created by the East German communist state was to divide one of the most beautiful and by 1961, ruined cities of the world; dividing families, friends and lovers. Its creation, and its sudden collapse...

In this book, historian Evans tells of Germany's radical reshaping under Nazi rule. Every area of life, from literature, culture, and the arts to religion, education, and science, was subordinated to the relentless drive to prepare Germany for war. Evans shows how the Nazis attempted to reorder every aspect of German society, encountering many kinds and degrees of resistance along the way but gradually winning the acceptance of the German people....

The autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.

Hannah resents stories of her Jewish heritage and of the past until, when opening the door during a Passover Seder, she finds herself in Poland during World War II where she experiences the horrors of a concentration camp, and learns why she-- and we--need to remember the past.

Five days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a twenty-one-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly, a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber's tail - a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination...

Chronicles the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, from the 1939 invasion of Poland through Adolph Hitler's suicide, and provides testimonies from a variety of people, which includes soldiers, Hitler Youth activists, middle-class housewives, and more.

"A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is still fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin, whose life is characterized by false starts and unfinished projects, is trying to flee his overbearing...

From the internationally acclaimed author of Hitler’s Private Library, a dramatic recounting of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler seized power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler’s National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist,...

Looks at the diverse unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler, profiles the various conspirators involved in the incidents, and speculates about the potential global ramifications if one of the attempts had been successful.

In December of 1938, almost by accident, German chemist Otto Hahn experimented with uranium and found that its atoms split when put next to radioactive material. When word got out, physicists and chemists across the United States, Great Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union raced to find a way to make a bomb by splitting the atom.