The End of the World in Breslau

Author: Marek Krajewski
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612191789
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The second installment in the darkly intelligent series that The Independent called “As noir as they get.” 1927, Breslau, Poland: Two elaborate and sadistic murders are discovered within days of each other. The body of an unknown musician, bound and gagged, is found behind a false wall in a shoemaker’s workshop. The victim had been sealed in alive. Elsewhere in the city, the horrifically mutilated body of a locksmith is found. Next to each victim is a torn-out calendar page, with the day of the death marked in blood. Nothing else seems to connect the cases. It falls to Criminal Councillor Eberhard Mock to solve the case, the mystery taking him still further into the Breslau underworld he knows only too well. Meanwhile, his hard-drinking nocturnal habits soon threaten his volatile marriage, and prompt some strange behavior from his wife ... and before long, Mock and his team will be investigating not only two of the grisliest murders in the city’s history, but the councillor’s own wife.

The End of the World in Breslau

Author: Marek Krajewski
Publisher: MacLehose Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The city of Breslau, which was the atmospheric heart of the first of Marek Krajewski's novels in English, Death in Breslau, is as a Georg Grosz backcloth to the second of Criminal Counsellor Eberhard Mock's investigations into a series of seemingly unrelated murders in the late 1920s. While Mock searches for the key to the mystery which afflicts his department in records of crimes committed in the past, his young wife, neglected by his obsessive work, falls among perverse and shocking companions and into contact with a sect that preaches the imminent end of the world. Krajewski's novels are as original as they are disturbing.

Phantoms of Breslau

Author: Marek Krajewski
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612192734
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
“Phantoms of Breslau is a cynical, moody thriller which solidifies Krajewski’s position as a distinctive voice in contemporary European fiction.” —Irish Examiner Breslau, 1919: The hideously battered, naked bodies of four sailors are discovered on an island in the River Oder. When Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock, back from the war, arrives at the scene to investigate, he finds an enigmatic note addressed to him insisting that he admit to past mistakes and become a believer. As he endeavors to piece together the elements of the brutal crime, Mock combs the brothels and drinking dens of the then still-German city of Breslau and is drawn into an insidious game: it seems that anyone he questions during the course of the investigation is destined to become the next victim. Meanwhile, Mock uncovers a secret society that has the Criminal Assistant himself clearly in its sights. Dark, sophisticated, and uncompromising, the distinctive Breslau series has already received broad critical acclaim. Phantoms of Breslau confirms Eberhard Mock as one of the most outrageous and original detectives in crime fiction.

Uprooted

Author: Gregor Thum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 551

Book Description
How a German city became Polish after World War II With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants—almost all of them ethnic Germans—were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's "amputated memory." Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II. Uprooted traces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.

Breslau 1945: Hitler's final fortress

Author: Eduardo Manuel Gil Martínez
Publisher: Soldiershop Publishing
ISBN: 8893276232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
In 1944 Adolf Hitler ordered the creation of a defensive line based on fortress cities (festung) capable of stopping the enemy and then serving as a base for a counter-offensive that few saw as possible. Breslau, in Lower Silesia, was one of the chosen cities. For its fortification defensive rings and bunkers were built, artillery was reinforced and the civilian population was militarized. At the time of the Soviet attack the city was immediately surrounded. From February 13th, 1945 to May 6th, 1945, its supply could only come by air and was directed from Berlin. Parachute units arrived on gliders, while on the ground regiments such as the SS “Besslein” repelled the enemy and carried out hand attacks that forced the Russians to defend themselves. Breslau was not conquered: its military commander surrendered the city only when Berlin had already fallen and the fighting in Europe had stopped almost everywhere. During the siege, German forces suffered more than 6.000 deaths and 23.000 wounded to defend Breslau, while the Soviet losses were more than 60.000. The civilian casualties were as high as 80.000. Breslau was the last major city in Germany to surrender, capitulating only two days before the end of the war in Europe. This new issue of the Witness to War collection, illustrated with over a hundred pictures, offers the reader the exciting story of what was the last stronghold of the Reich.

A Community under Siege

Author: Abraham Ascher
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804755184
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
This is a study of how the Jewish community of Breslau--the third largest and one of the most affluent in Germany--coped with Nazi persecution. Ascher has included the experiences of his immediate family, although the book is based mainly on archival sources, numerous personal reminiscences, as well as publications by the Jewish community in the 1930s. It is the first comprehensive study of a local Jewish community in Germany under Nazi rule. Until the very end, the Breslau Jews maintained a stance of defiance and sought to persevere as a cohesive group with its own institutions. They categorically denied the Nazi claim that they were not genuine Germans, but at the same time they also refused to abandon their Jewish heritage. They created a new school for the children evicted from public schools, established a variety of new cultural institutions, placed new emphasis on religious observance, maintained the Jewish hospital against all odds, and, perhaps most remarkably, increased the range of welfare services, which were desperately needed as more and more of their number lost their livelihood. In short, the Jews of Breslau refused to abandon either their institutions or the values that they had nurtured for decades. In the end, it was of no avail as the Nazis used their overwhelming power to liquidate the community by force.

No Justice in Germany

Author: Willy
Publisher: Stanford Studies in Jewish His
ISBN: 9780804773249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The diaries of Willy Cohn chronicle the progressive constriction and eventual destruction of Jewish life in Breslau, Germany, under the Nazis.

The Scottish Book

Author: R. Daniel Mauldin
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3319228978
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
The second edition of this book updates and expands upon a historically important collection of mathematical problems first published in the United States by Birkhäuser in 1981. These problems serve as a record of the informal discussions held by a group of mathematicians at the Scottish Café in Lwów, Poland, between the two world wars. Many of them were leaders in the development of such areas as functional and real analysis, group theory, measure and set theory, probability, and topology. Finding solutions to the problems they proposed has been ongoing since World War II, with prizes offered in many cases to those who are successful. In the 35 years since the first edition published, several more problems have been fully or partially solved, but even today many still remain unsolved and several prizes remain unclaimed. In view of this, the editor has gathered new and updated commentaries on the original 193 problems. Some problems are solved for the first time in this edition. Included again in full are transcripts of lectures given by Stanislaw Ulam, Mark Kac, Antoni Zygmund, Paul Erdös, and Andrzej Granas that provide amazing insights into the mathematical environment of Lwów before World War II and the development of The Scottish Book. Also new in this edition are a brief history of the University of Wrocław’s New Scottish Book, created to revive the tradition of the original, and some selected problems from it. The Scottish Book offers a unique opportunity to communicate with the people and ideas of a time and place that had an enormous influence on the development of mathematics and try their hand on the unsolved problems. Anyone in the general mathematical community with an interest in the history of modern mathematics will find this to be an insightful and fascinating read.

Five Germanys I Have Known

Author: Fritz Stern
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374530860
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Book Description
Weaving together interpretative narrative, acute analysis, and dramatic personal anecdote, Stern brings to life the Germany's he has experienced: Weimar, the Third Reich, postwar West and East Germany, and the unified country after 1990.

Victory at Gallipoli, 1915

Author: Klaus Wolf
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526768178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 683

Book Description
“The author delivers in fine detail, supported by excellent appendices and notes, the role of officers and men in the defense of the Dardanelles.” —Michael McCarthy, Battlefield Guide The German contribution in a famous Turkish victory at Gallipoli has been overshadowed by the Mustafa Kemal legend. The commanding presence of German General Liman von Sanders in the operations is well known. But relatively little is known about the background of German military intervention in Ottoman affairs. Klaus Wolf fills this gap as a result of extensive research in the German records and the published literature. He examines the military assistance offered by the German Empire in the years preceding 1914 and the German involvement in ensuring that the Ottomans fought on the side of the Central Powers and that they made best use of the German military and naval missions. He highlights the fundamental reforms that were required after the battering the Turks received in various Balkan wars, particularly in the Turkish Army, and the challenges that faced the members of the German missions. When the allied invasion of Gallipoli was launched, German officers became a vital part of a robust Turkish defense—be it at sea or on land, at senior command level or commanding units of infantry and artillery. In due course German aviators were to be, in effect, founding fathers of the Turkish air arm; while junior ranks played an important part as, for example, machine gunners. This book is not only their missing memorial but a missing link in understanding the tragedy that was Gallipoli. “A great addition to any Gallipoli library.” —The Western Front Association