Quadriga
Hardcover, 382 pages
First Release: 10/14/2011
ISBN: 978-3-86995-010-5
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Sven Felix Kellerhoff
Berlin during the War
History
Berlin during the Second World War. Contemporary witnesses recount their daily lives in a time of war
Nowhere in Europe did the experience of war last longer than in Berlin: from the first air raid alarm on September 1, 1939, to the city's surrender on May 2, 1945. No other town was bombed for as long or as frequently, nowhere else were more Jews persecuted, and no other place felt the transition from the “hot war” to the Cold War more acutely in 1945/46.
Roughly seven decades later, the generation that experienced the Second World War in person has, for the most part, died off. In spite of that, the war remains a presence in our consciousness—not only due to the horrific crimes of the Wehrmacht and the SS apparatus, but equally because the direct and indirect consequences are still visible in the city. Today, however, there is hardly anyone who can still describe the experience of war and the suffering it entails. And even if they can, the stories we hear directly from them always represent only tiny pieces of the mosaic.
Sven Felix Kellerhoff has compiled a large body of testimony by those who witnessed the age. His book will keep alive the memory of a distressing period that was shaped by hunger and food rationing, blackouts, air raid alarms, destruction, death, forced labor, and foreign workers. And it recalls to mind a city populated almost exclusively by women and old men, because its children had been sent away and its sons and fathers were serving on the front lines. Surprisingly little has been written for a broader audience about Berlin during World War II and under National Socialism in general.
BERLIN DURING THE WAR is the first comprehensive and exhaustive overview of daily life in wartime Berlin
Nowhere in Europe did the experience of war last longer than in Berlin: from the first air raid alarm on September 1, 1939, to the city's surrender on May 2, 1945. No other town was bombed for as long or as frequently, nowhere else were more Jews persecuted, and no other place felt the transition from the “hot war” to the Cold War more acutely in 1945/46.
Roughly seven decades later, the generation that experienced the Second World War in person has, for the most part, died off. In spite of that, the war remains a presence in our consciousness—not only due to the horrific crimes of the Wehrmacht and the SS apparatus, but equally because the direct and indirect consequences are still visible in the city. Today, however, there is hardly anyone who can still describe the experience of war and the suffering it entails. And even if they can, the stories we hear directly from them always represent only tiny pieces of the mosaic.
Sven Felix Kellerhoff has compiled a large body of testimony by those who witnessed the age. His book will keep alive the memory of a distressing period that was shaped by hunger and food rationing, blackouts, air raid alarms, destruction, death, forced labor, and foreign workers. And it recalls to mind a city populated almost exclusively by women and old men, because its children had been sent away and its sons and fathers were serving on the front lines. Surprisingly little has been written for a broader audience about Berlin during World War II and under National Socialism in general.
BERLIN DURING THE WAR is the first comprehensive and exhaustive overview of daily life in wartime Berlin
