
|
|
Roland Thimme, родился в 1931 году в Потсдаме, историк Karl Hofer: "Schwarzmondnacht - Potsdam
1944"
|
“Black Moon Night: Authentic Diaries Report (1933–1953). Nazi Dictatorship — Soviet Occupation Arbitrary Rule”
Brief description
The diaries and notes assembled in this volume, written against the background of life under two dictatorships, offer a rare view of the pressure under which ordinary people lived and of their everyday perceptions. They shed light on personal experience under both National Socialism and the system of “real socialism.” These records were not edited for publication when they were written; they were intended for private use. Precisely for that reason they can provide an unusually direct view of the period, while still requiring careful historical interpretation.
Critical diaries about the “Third Reich” were rare because keeping such records could be dangerous. As private spaces of retreat, diaries could perform both a political and a moral function for their writers. During the war, men at the front often recorded their experiences in letters, while women writing during the final phase of the war frequently did so under immediate threat. The texts deal with war, the bombing of cities, the collapse of 1945 and the consequences of military conquest. They also record encounters with Soviet soldiers and everyday life under Soviet occupation.
After the Red Army victory, many women found themselves in desperate circumstances, struggling with fear and the need for self-preservation in the face of threatened violence. At the same time, responsibility for children, relatives and neighbors often rested on their shoulders, and they met these tasks with remarkable determination.
More than six decades after the capitulation of the “Third Reich,” authentic diaries published for the first time allow readers to look closely at the experiences of previous generations in a state of emergency and to understand the destruction of the bourgeois world in which they had lived. Careful commentary places the documents in the context of changing political systems and uses the biographies of Hans Schemin-Petit, Countess Ellen Poninski, Marianne Vogt, Katharina Wolley and Hans Werner Thimme to illuminate different patterns of behavior, adaptation and survival. The shocking events recorded in these documents underline the importance of democratic constitutional government and political education.
Press
“This publication gives an impression of what everyday life was like for ordinary Germans: life in Nazi Germany, in wartime and under occupation. Six ordinary people (...) testify to how they coped — how they found food, clothing and fuel in a bombed-out country, searched for relatives, or endured violence by the conquerors.” FAZ
“After Rote Fahnen über Potsdam, Roland Thimme has edited another volume that again brings together authentic diaries and notes from the years 1933 to 1953. Everyday life under the Nazi dictatorship, in the Soviet occupation zone and during the first years of the GDR appears here in texts written naturally and without thought of later publication. The documentary and emotional value of Schwarzmondnacht lies in its reports of individual fates, events and moods during those two decades.” Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten
“Roland Thimme has provided rich source material through his discoveries and has offered initial interpretations in his commentaries. Historians are now called upon to take up this impulse and work with the material with still greater critical attention to the sources.” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 292 (2011)
“Thimme comments on the authentic texts competently and with restraint, because the diaries and notes essentially speak for themselves. The reader encounters genuinely lived stories: life in a state of emergency, temptation and opportunism, violence, but also the will to survive.” intern AA
“Roland Thimme presents further moving and deeply personal documents in this book.”
Der Nuthe-Bote
“In diary entries from the period of the Nazi dictatorship and in notes often written shortly after the dramatic events of the ‘collapse,’ authentic accounts of personal experience attain an impressive emotional density. They allow today’s readers, if not literally to become contemporaries, at least to understand something of the situation in which people then found themselves.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte online
About the author
Roland Thimme, born in Potsdam in 1931, is a historian.
Karl Hofer: “Schwarzmondnacht — Potsdam 1944”
© Hentrich & Hentrich