We tend to think of death as a basic and immutable fact of life. Yet death, too, has a history. Death in Berlin traces the rituals, practices, perceptions, and sensibilities surrounding death in the context of Berlin's multiple transformations over the decades between Germany's defeat in World War I and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Evocatively illustrated and drawing on a rich collection of sources, Monica Black reveals the centrality of death to the evolving moral and social life of one metropolitan community. In doing so, she connects the intimacies of everyday life and death to events on the grand historical stage that changed the lives of millions - all in a city that stood at the center of some of the twentieth century's most transformative events.
“Evocative. . . . Epic. . . . Chock-full of colorful anecdotes and charismatic figures, A Demon-Haunted Land not only offers a brilliant rethinking of postwar German history, but also asks us to see t
We tend to think of death as a basic and immutable fact of life. Yet death, too, has a history. Death in Berlin traces the rituals, practices, perceptions, and sensibilities surrounding death in the context of Berlin's multiple transformations over the decades between Germany's defeat in World War I and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Evocatively illustrated and drawing on a rich collection of sources, Monica Black reveals the centrality of death to the evolving moral and social life of one metropolitan community. In doing so, she connects the intimacies of everyday life and death to events on the grand historical stage that changed the lives of millions - all in a city that stood at the center of some of the twentieth century's most transformative events.
A revelatory counterhistory of postwar Germany, not as a reborn democracy but as a nation convulsed by apocalyptic visions, witchcraft trials, and supernatural obsessionsIn the aftermath of World War
Historians have long debated the role of the occult in the Third Reich. After 1945 the consensus held that occultism, an ostensibly anti-modern, irrational blend of pseudo-religious and -scientific pr
