Broken Lives is a gripping account of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did.
Author Konrad H. Jarausch “illuminates the possibilities of history and consciousness through the testimony of dozens of Germans who struggled to make sense of their lives and the times they lived in,” Peter Fritzsche, author of An Iron Wind: Europe under Hitler, said about the book in remarks published in the Princeton University Press website.
Broken Lives is very moving account of 20th-century German history, he added.
Jarausch is professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His many books include Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century and Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (both Princeton). He lives in Chapel Hill and Berlin.
Elizabeth Heineman, University of Iowa, commented: “By focusing on Germans born in the 1920s, Jarausch leads us to think deeply about the ways people experience the intersection of big historical events and their own lives. This book is a tremendous accomplishment — comprehensive and learned, yet down-to-earth and a good read.”
