Select Bibliography of English-language Works

Twentieth-century German history is a highly contentious field, with innumerable books on the Third Reich alone. I have listed here just a short selection which will guide the reader towards more specialist works; further references will be found in the notes. A few older works have been retained when they illustrate particular approaches or represent historiographical landmarks.

General Works Covering All or a Substantial Part of the Period

  1. F. Biess, M. Roseman and H. Schissler (eds), Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity. Essays in Modern German History (NY and Oxford: Berghahn, 2007).
  2. S. Colvin (ed.), Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture (London: Routledge, 2014).
  3. M. Fulbrook (ed.), Twentieth-century Germany (London: Arnold, 2001).
  4. M. Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
  5. William W. Hagen, German History in Modern Times. Four Lives of the Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  6. Martin Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012)
  7. Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Weimar Germany and the Third Reich

  1. G. Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999).
  2. G. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (London: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
  3. D. Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
  4. O. Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
  5. O. Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2000).
  6. R. Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
  7. D. Bloxham and T. Kushner, The Holocaust. Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
  8. K. D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
  9. M. Broszat, The Hitler State (London: Longman, 1981).
  10. M. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987).
  11. C. Browning, Fateful Months, revd edn (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991).
  12. C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: HarperCollins, 1992).
  13. C. Browning, The Path to Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
  14. C. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  15. C. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution (London: Heinemann, 2004).
  16. M. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  17. M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
  18. P. Burrin, Hitler and the Jews (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).
  19. J. Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  20. G. Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos: Voices from a Beleaguered Society 1939–1944 (London: Hodder Arnold, 2002).
  21. D. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society (London: Routledge, 1994).
  22. L. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
  23. R. J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin, 2003).
  24. R. J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London: Penguin, 2005).
  25. R. J. Evans,The Third Reich at War, 1939–1945 (London: Penguin, 2008).
  26. G. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985).
  27. N. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
  28. S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
  29. S. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
  30. M. Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz. Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
  31. P. Gay, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
  32. R. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
  33. R. Gellately, Backing Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
  34. S. Gigliotti and B. Lang (eds), The Holocaust: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
  35. D. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown, 1996).
  36. J. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
  37. E. Harvey, Women and the Nazi East (London: Yale University Press, 2003).
  38. H. Heer and K. Naumann (eds), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1944 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000).
  39. H. Heiber, The Weimar Republic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
  40. U. Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000).
  41. R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985).
  42. G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker (eds), The Führer-state: Myth and Reality (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981).
  43. P. Hoffmann, The German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  44. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds), Ordinary People as Mass Murderers. Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
  45. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
  46. M. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
  47. M. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
  48. I. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
  49. I. Kershaw, The Hitler Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
  50. I. Kershaw, Hitler: A Profile in Power (London: Longman, 1991).
  51. I. Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 1: Hubris, 1889–1936 (London: Penguin, 1998).
  52. I. Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: Nemesis, 1936–1945 (London: Penguin, 2000).
  53. I. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 4th edn (London: Arnold, 2000).
  54. I. Kershaw (ed.), Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990).
  55. E. Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).
  56. C. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
  57. C. Leitz (ed.), The Third Reich (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
  58. M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
  59. T. Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 1993).
  60. T. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
  61. H. Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
  62. H. Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
  63. J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds), Nazism, vol. 1, ‘Hitler’s Rise to Power’ (Exeter: Exeter Studies in History, 1983).
  64. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939 (Exeter: Exeter Studies in History, 1984).
  65. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Exeter: Exeter Studies in History, 1988).
  66. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, vol. 4: The German Home Front in World War II (Exeter: Exeter Studies in History, 1998).
  67. R. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
  68. R. Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
  69. R. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
  70. D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany (London: Batsford, 1987).
  71. D. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Allen Lane, 1991).
  72. D. Reese, Growing up Female in Nazi Germany (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
  73. A. Rossino, Hitler strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003).
  74. D. Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).
  75. R. Shandley (ed.), Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
  76. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2010).
  77. N. Stargardt, Witnesses of War. Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).
  78. J. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (London: Croom Helm, 1975).
  79. J. Stephenson, The Nazi Organisation of Women (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
  80. J. Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis (London: Hambledon, 2006).
  81. D. Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
  82. A. Tooze, Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2006).
  83. E. D. Weitz, Weimar Germany. Promise and Tragedy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).
  84. J. Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

East and West Germany 1945‒1990

  1. M. Allinson, Politics and Popular Opinion in East Germany, 1945–68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
  2. T. Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name (New York: Random House, 1993).
  3. F. Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).
  4. G. Bruce, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany, 1945–1955 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
  5. P. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
  6. D. Childs and R. Popplewell, The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
  7. D. Crew (ed.), Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
  8. R. Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968).
  9. M. Dennis, Social and Economic Modernisation from Honecker to Kohl (London: Pinter, 1993).
  10. M. Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality (London: Pearson, 2003).
  11. R. J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989).
  12. J. Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
  13. N. Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
  14. M. Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1945–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
  15. M. Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
  16. M. Fulbrook, Interpretations of the Two Germanies, 1945–1990, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
  17. M. Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (London: Yale University Press, 2005).
  18. M. Fulbrook (ed.), Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalization of Rule’? (New York: Berghahn, 2009).
  19. M. Fulbrook and A. Port (eds), Becoming East Germans. Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (New York; Berghahn. 2013).
  20. G.-J. Glaessner and I. Wallace (eds), The German Revolution of 1989 (Oxford: Berg, 1992).
  21. R. Goeckel, The Lutheran Church and the East German State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
  22. P. Grieder, The East German Leadership 1946–73: Conflict and Crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
  23. D. Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family and Consumerism in the GDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
  24. J. Herf, Divided Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
  25. K. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999).
  26. K. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
  27. C. Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
  28. D. Keithly, The Collapse of East German Communism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992).
  29. L. Kettenacker, Germany since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
  30. C. Klessmann (ed.), The Divided Past: Rethinking Post-war German History (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001).
  31. J. Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
  32. A. Kramer, The West German Economy (Oxford: Berg, 1991).
  33. M. Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
  34. W. Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (London: Collins, 1957).
  35. W. Loth, Stalin’s Unwanted Child: The Soviet Union, the German Question, and the Founding of the GDR (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
  36. J. Madarász, Conflict and Compromise in East Germany, 1971–1989: A Precarious Stability (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
  37. J. Madarász, Working life in East Germany, 1961 to 1979: Arriving in the Everyday (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
  38. C. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  39. C. Maier, Dissolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
  40. P. Major, Behind the Berlin Wall. East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  41. P. Major and J. Osmond (eds), The Workers’ and Peasants’ State: Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
  42. A. J. McAdams, Germany Divided (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
  43. A. McDougall, Youth Politics in East Germany: The Free German Youth Movement 1946–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
  44. L. H. McFalls, Communism’s Collapse, Democracy’s Demise? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
  45. J. McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism. Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
  46. R. Moeller (ed.), West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
  47. R. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
  48. N. Naimark, The Russians in Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
  49. A. J. Nicholls, The Bonn Republic: West German Democracy, 1945–1990 (London: Longman, 1997).
  50. A. Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
  51. P. O’Dochartaigh, Germany since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
  52. J. Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation. Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR 1945-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  53. K. Pence and P. Betts (eds), Socialist Modern. East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
  54. U. Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
  55. R. Pommerin (ed.), The American Impact on Postwar Germany (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995).
  56. A. Port, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  57. P. Pulzer, German Politics 1945–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
  58. E. Rubin, Synthetic Socialism. Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
  59. H. Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
  60. H. P. Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer, 2 vols (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995, 1997).
  61. G. Smith, W. Paterson, P. H. Merkl (eds), Developments in West German Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
  62. D. Spilker, The East German Leadership and the Division of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
  63. R. Stokes, Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany 1945–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
  64. H. A. Turner, Germany from Partition to Reunification (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
  65. I. Turner (ed.), Reconstruction in Postwar Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1989).
  66. H. A. Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West. Volume II: 1933–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  67. R. Woods (ed.), Opposition in the GDR under Honecker (London: Macmillan, 1986).

Unification and Germany since 1990

  1. G.-J. Glaessner, The Unification Process in Germany (London: Pinter, 1992).
  2. H. James and M. Stone (eds), When the Wall Came Down (London: Routledge, 1992).
  3. K. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
  4. K. Jarausch and V. Gransow (eds), Uniting Germany: Documents and Debates (Oxford: Berghahn, 1994).
  5. N. Hodgkin and C. Pearce (eds), The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011).
  6. R. Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties. Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
  7. A. J. McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
  8. P. H. Merkl (ed.), The Federal Republic of Germany at Forty-five: Union without Unity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
  9. M. Mertes, S. Müller, H. A. Winkler (eds), In Search of Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996).
  10. B. Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance in Unified Germany. Stasi informers and their impact on society (London: Routledge, 1999).
  11. W. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past (London: Routledge, 2002).
  12. W. Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Contemporary Germany and the Third Reich (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
  13. J. Osmond (ed.), German Reunification (Harlow: Longman, 1992).
  14. S. Szabo, The Diplomacy of German Unification (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).
  15. K. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
  16. P. Zelikow and C. Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).