teacher laempel from Max and Moritz
Teacher Laempel from Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz (1865)

Teaching German History:
Books, Web Sites and Course syllabi

compiled for UCSB Hist 133c: "Germany after 1945"

by Professor Harold Marcuse (homepage)
contact: marcuse@history.ucsb.edu
links compiled Dec. 16, 2003; last update: Mar. 2, 2006/8/24/09

Suggested books for book essay

Topics and links for web projects
Courses on post-1945 German History

Suggested books for book essay (back to top)
(in rough chronological order; links current as of 1/29/06; see also Book Essay page)

  • Early post-1945 period
    • Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (UNC, 2002) (amazon)
    • Elizabeth Heinemann, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (UC, 2003) (amazon)
    • Michael Brenner, Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 1997)
    • Jay Howard Geller , Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 (Cambridge, 2004)(amazon)
    • Steven Remy, The Heidelberg Myth : The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Harvard, 2003), 352 pages (amazon)
  • 1950s
    • Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing of National Identity After Hitler (UNC 1995)(amazon)
    • Stefan Heym, Five days in June: A novel (Prometheus, 1978 [1974]) UCSB: PT2617.E948 F813
    • Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (UC, 1996)(amazon)
    • Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (UC, 2003)(amazon)
    • Norbert Frei, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past (Columbia, 2002)(amazon)
  • 1960s & 1970s
    • David Schoenbaum, The Spiegel Affair (Doubleday, 1968) UCSB: DD259.2 S37
    • Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (UC, 2004)(amazon)
    • Nick Thomas. Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. xv + 277 pp. (H-German rev. 6/05)
  • Politics
    • Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890-1990 (Princeton, 1996)(amazon)
    • Lee McGowan, The Radical Right in Germany: 1870 to the Present (Longman, 2003), 224 pages (amazon)
  • Legacies of Nazism
    • Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Harvard, 1997)
    • Helga Schneider, Let me go (Penguin, 2001) (amazon)
    • Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (UNC, 2001)(amazon)
  • Stasi, Life in the GDR
    • Joel Agee, Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (Chicago, 2000), about 1948-1960 (amazon). See also his mother's 176-page memoir: Alma Neuman, Always Straight Ahead: A Memoir (LSU, 1993)(amazon)
    • Timothy Garton Ash, The File (amazon)
    • Gareth Dale. Popular Protest in East Germany: Judgments on the Streets,
      1945-1989
      . New York: Routledge, 2005. 246 pp. UCSB: DD286.4 .D35 2005
    • Feiwel Kupferberg. The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002. xi + 228 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. UCSB: DD283 .K86 2002 [4/03 H-German review]
    • Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (1995), 277pp. UCSB: DD289 .J67 1995
    • Mike Dennis, Norman Laporte, The Stasi: Myth and Reality (amazon)
    • Dirk Philipsen, Voices from East Germany's Revolutionary Autumn of 1989 (amazon)
    • Peter Marcuse, A Personal and Political Journal of a Year in East Germany, 1989-1990 (amazon)
    • Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal, 1989-1990
    • Konrad H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship As Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (amazon) --as an anthology, perhaps not suitable
    • Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949-1989 (Oxford, 1998)(amazon)
    • Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (Arnold, 2002)(amazon)
    • Raymond G. Stokes, Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945-1990 [CEH 38:1(2005) rev by Kees Gispen]
  • Process of German Unification, 1989-1990
    • Jonathan Grix. The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR (amazon)
    • A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (amazon)
    • Konrad H. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (Oxford, 1994) (amazon)
    • Harold James and Marla Stone (eds.), When the Wall came down: Reactions to German Unification (Routledge, 1992)(amazon)
    • Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany's Road to Unification (Brookings, 1993),384 pages (amazon)
  • Post-Unification (life after 1990)
    • Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Berg, 2005) (pub's site)
    • Marc Fisher, After the Wall: Germany, the Germans, and the Burdens of History (Simon & Shuster, 1995), 352 pages (amazon)

Ideas and Resources for term papers & web projects (back to top)
(in rough chronological order; links last checked: 1/29/06)

  • Marshall Plan:
    • The Library of Congress put its 1997 (50th Anniv.) exhibition on-line (link).
    • The US Embassy in Germany has an informative site with the text of Marshall's Harvard speech. The core of the site is a text by Ohio State Univ. professor Michael Hogan (link).
    • The UCSB library has a copy of Documentary History of the Truman Presidency (Dennis Merrill, ed); vol. 3 is entitled " United States policy in occupied Germany after World War II: denazification, decartelization, demilitarization, and democratization." UCSB call no. Main Library E813 .D56 1995.
  • 1948 Berlin Blockade and airlift
    • The British National Archives offers a teaching site with six documents (link).
    • The Truman Library has a resource site (link) with a student activity portion (link), it also "chunked" the book Airbridge to Berlin and put it online (link).
    • The online supplement to Hyde Flippo's book The German Way has a summary illustrated with present-day photos (link).
    • Prof. Rempel's lecture text "The Berlin Airlift of 1948"
    • The US Embassy in Germany offers a July 23, 1998 speech by Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. John Hamre on "The 50th Anniversary of the Berlin Airlift" (link).
    • Willy Brandt.org has a short page with definitions (link).
    • PBS's site on their "Race for the Superbomb" film has a page (link).
    • Houghton-Mifflin textbook page with a short synopsis (link).
  • 1953 uprising
    • In 1999 one of Prof. Marcuse's proseminar students did a research paper on international aspects: Int'l Effects of June 17, 1953 Uprising (link)
    • Prof. Gerhard Rempel's lecture text (link)
    • 3-page summary of a June 2003 lecture at the German Historical Institute in Washington, a "50 years later" assessment (pdf)
    • German Gov't Political Education Center site (in German) has lots of multimedia documents (link)
  • 1950s Politics
    • E. German booklet celebrating Khrushchev's Aug. 7, 1957 visit to East Berlin, on Randall Bytwerk's German propaganda site at Calvin College (link).
    • Woodrow Wilson Center: Hope M. Harrison, Translation and Commentary "New Evidence on Khrushchev's 1958 Berlin Ultimatum" (link).
  • Berlin Wall
    • Washington, DC Newseum site has four features: news reporting East vs. West, historical story, Stalin manipulates a photo, essay on censorship (link)
    • Chris DeWitt maintains a regularly updated Berlin Wall site with some short essays he wrote since his first visit in 1979, lots of pictures, and a short, annotated list of links (link).
    • Burkhard Kirste at the Free University of Berlin maintains a site with a short history of the wall, some facts, and a set of links (link).
    • Paper by one of Prof. Marcuse's proseminar students, with bibliography: Politics, People and the Berlin Crisis: June-August, 1961 (link)
    • Yahoo's page of links
    • The British National Archives offers a teaching site with six documents (link).
  • Willy Brandt
  • JFK's June 1963 speech in Berlin [8/09: web archive version]:
    • The JFK library has a page with notes and audio
    • Joe Knapp (no info on who he is) maintains a comprehensive JFK site with the full text of the Berlin speech (link) and press reactions to it (link), as well as a discussion of the "jelly doughnut" reproach (link)
    • Philipp Huning, a student at Tubingen University, has a site with primary materials, including JFK's diary entries about his 1945 travels through Germany (overview [webarchive.org copy]). He created the site for a summer semester 2000 internet seminar about JFK (hyperlinked seminar syllabus). He also has the complete text of the speech (link).
  • Cold War:
    • CNN has a site based on its award-winning 24-episode 1998 TV series (link).
      TurnerLearning.com made a site for educators based on the CNN series (link).
  • Red Army Faction (1970s left-wing terrorism)
    • Richard Huffman, author of This is Baader-Meinhof, maintains Baader-Meinhof.com (link)
    • Wikipedia has a detailed, well-hyperlinked page (link)
    • The Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism has a short page (link)
  • 1985 commemoration at Bitburg
    • Thesis paper by one of Prof. Marcuse's students in 1999 (link)
    • UTexas has the texts of Reagan's speeches in Belsen (link) and Bitburg (link)
    • The military newspaper Stars & Stripes posted its May 1985 news reports on Belsen (link) and Bitburg (link).
    • Joey Ramone wrote a protest song about it (link to article)
  • Issues of German Unification in 1990
  • Holocaust-era Assets: Compensation and Restitution
    • US Dept. of State has a collection of documents relating to compensating victims and restoring assets (link).

Courses about 20th century/post-1945 Germany (back to top)
(links last updated 1/29/06)
Explore some of these on-line courses to see how other instructors structure their courses, and what readings they use.


Page created Nov. 9, 2004 from a Jan. 2004 section of the Hist 133c course homepage; updated see header
back to top, to Hist 133c homepage, to Prof. Marcuse's homepage