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World history ww1
Analysis of world war 1
A eassy about world war 1
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BIOGRAPHICAL DATA: William Hermanns was born on the 23rd of July 1895 in Koblenz, Germany to a merchant family. His parents were Michael and Bertha. Mr. Hermanns was highly educated with a M.A. from the University of Berlin and he continued school to receive s Ph.D. from University of Frankfurt. His career consisted of a being a German soldier during world war one from 1915 to 1920. He was released as a French prisoner of war in 1920 and was prepared for a diplomatic career in the League of Nation. He escaped his homeland in 1934 because of the rule of Hitler. He then began as a researcher at Harvard University and lectured during the summer sessions. William worked towards a professional occupation of being a professor. Mr. Hermanns worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington D.C.
He volunteered for the German army during World War I and became a prisoner and then a sergeant and received his iron cross and the cross of honor. He had other writing as well, for example: Mary and the Mocker, Einstein and the Poet, Die Feder stockt and a few others. Some works in progress are Seed of the Last Days, thinking back on philosophy and people. Another is Theology of Violence, which are his individual experiences with Goebbels, Hitler, Puis XII, and Mussolini. William Hermanns personal vow as an author started when he promised that if God saved him he would serve God for as long as he lived. This encourages him to write about man’s instinctive conscience through his own special involvements. Mr. Hermanns also does not believe in chance, but in coincidence and meaning of events that seem related. 1
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS: The subject matter of this book was a soldier’s personal experience in World War I. William’s involvement was from May 1915 to January 1920. The title of the book refers to a Holocaust, not that of Hitler, but of the aspirations of being a decorated was hero and glory for Germany to the horrors of poison gas, trench warfare, and war’s irreparable disruption of everyday life. He spent one year in the trenches of the Argonne Forest, two months in the sector of Verdun, and forty months in French captivity and then finally a full year rebuilding the destroyed area around Verdun after the war was over. He established many relationships, self-epiphanies, not so favorable treatment, and many other first hand occurrences throughout his servitude that provide a very vivid image of life as a soldier.
Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier is a work notable not only for its vivid and uncompromising account of his experience as a member of the Wehrmacht in World War II, but also for its subtle and incisive commentary about the very nature of war itself. What is perhaps most intriguing about Sajer’s novel is his treatment of the supposedly “universal” virtues present within war such as professionalism, patriotism, camaraderie, and self-sacrifice. Sajer introduces a break between how war is thought about in the abstract and how it has actually been conducted historically.
Storm of Steel provides a memoir of the savagery and periods of beauty that Ernst Jünger’s experienced while serving the German army during the First World War. Though the account does not take a clear stand, it lacks any embedded emotional effects or horrors of the Great War that left so few soldiers who survived unaffected. Jünger is very straightforward and does remorse over any of his recollections. The darkness of the hallucinations Jünger reports to have experienced provides subtle anti-war sentiment. However, in light of the descriptive adventures he sought during the brief moments of peace, the darkness seems to be rationalized as a sacrifice any soldier would make for duty and honor in a vain attempt for his nation’s victory. The overall lack of darkness and Jünger’s nonchalance about the brutality of war is enough to conclude that the account in Storm of Steel should be interpreted as a “pro” war novel; however, it should not be interpreted as “pro” violence or death.
Hitler’s Last Days is yet another gem written by the mastermind of history, Bill O’Reilly. How O’Reilly wrote this book with such great detail and information will never be discovered. The details in the book are nothing short of extraordinary. O’Reilly makes the reader act like a US official reading over battle operations and reviews. He adds personal letters from various officers around the war.
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
Upon finishing the book, moral questions and concepts face the reader. The obvious one is: How can Werner, a member of the notoriously evil Nazi party, be a virtuous person? According to the book, he is a righteous being: he rids the world of the Sea of Flames and selflessly
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is a memoir about his time as a Jewish child in multiple ghettos and death camps in and around Germany during World War II. The author shares about his reunions with family and acquaintances from the war in the years between then and now. Buergenthal wished to share his Holocaust story for a number of reasons: to prevent himself from just being another number, to contribute to history, to show the power and necessity of forgiveness, the will to not give up, and to question how people change in war allowing them to do unspeakable things. The memoir is not a cry for private attention, but a call to break the cycle of hatred and violence to end mass crimes.
During the Holocaust, around six million Jews were murdered due to Hitler’s plan to rid Germany of “heterogeneous people” in Germany, as stated in the novel, Life and Death in the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche. Shortly following a period of suffering, Hitler began leading Germany in 1930 to start the period of his rule, the Third Reich. Over time, his power and support from the country increased until he had full control over his people. Starting from saying “Heil Hitler!” the people of the German empire were cleverly forced into following Hitler through terror and threat. He had a group of leaders, the SS, who were Nazis that willingly took any task given, including the mass murder of millions of Jews due to his belief that they were enemies to Germany. German citizens were talked into participating or believing in the most extreme of things, like violent pogroms, deportations, attacks, and executions. Through the novel’s perspicacity of the Third Reich, readers can see how Hitler’s reign was a controversial time period summed up by courage, extremity, and most important of all, loyalty.
3. Not being able to find work or establish his practice, Speer’s main concern at the time in which he had entered into the Nazi party was purely for his career and not for the politics. Speer’s only contribution to the party was to drive party members in his can of official business. But Speer had ...
Rudolf Hess’s childhood was very odd; he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, because his father was in charge of running an export/import business. Since he was exposed to the kind of environment that included having to make hard choices, he was in the perfect setting to become a strict, leader. This environment also is probably where his did’t develop “people skills”, and that is why people called him odd and distant. Out of his three siblings, he was the oldest, making him a decent leader from the beginning, which will make his work in World War II very easy. His family was very wealthy, thus he was able to attend the University of Munich, there he studied political science and was influenced by his Professor Karl Haushofer, who was a former general who had theories on expansionism, and he also race formed the basic of the concept of Lebensraum. Hess’s life before World War II was full of war experience. He volunteered for W...
The Forgotten Soldier is not a book concerning the tactics and strategy of the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Nor does it analyze Nazi ideology and philosophy. Instead, it describes the life of a typical teenage German soldier on the Eastern Front. And through this examined life, the reader receives a first hand account of the atrocious nature of war. Sajer's book portrays the reality of combat in relation to the human physical, psychological, and physiological condition.
The phrase "a lesson to be learned and a tragedy to behold" has been indelibly attached to the Holocaust that to think of it in any other way is thought to insult all those of the Jewish community who lost their lives to the attempted genocide of their race by the Nazi regime. Despite such brevity attached to learning lessons from the Holocaust one must wonder whether the lesson has actually been learned or if people will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. Angela Merkel, the current German Chancellor, has stated that the German experiment towards multi-culturalism has failed, those who wish to migrate into the country must learn the German way whether it is the language they speak, the culture they have or the very religion they hold dear . Such sentiments seem to echo those of the former Third Reich which held the German way, the Aryan way, as the only path to which people should attempt to pursue. While this paper is not trying to vilify the current German government nor is it trying to compare it to the Third Reich, the fact remains that the steps their government is taking fall uneasily close to that of their vilified predecessor. The fact is though, the German government is merely following through with the popular sentiment of its citizenry who believe immigrants coming into the country disrupts the German way of life and all attempts to live side by side in peace have failed. Despite being a predominantly Christian nation who supposedly follow the way of Christ, to hear them say that makes one wonder whether their claims truly reflects their deeds. It is from this situation that the essay of Eckardt and its view that the Holocaust is a "Christian Problem" becomes relevant to what is happening in the world today.
The Weimar years were marked by extraordinary and unrivaled economic, political, and social struggles and crises. Its beginning was marked as being especially difficult in that Germany was wiped out and devastated after four years of the unprecedented warfare of World War I. By 1918 the world had been shocked with over 8.5 million killed on both Allies and Axis sides and many more severely mangled and scarred – body, mind and spirit. This is seen as German Soldier, Ernst Simmel, writes, “when I speak about the war as an event, as the cause of illness, I anticipate something has revealed...namely that it is not only the bloody war which leaves such devastating traces in those who took part in it. Rather, it is also the difficult conflict in which the individual finds himself in his fight against a world transformed by war. Either in the trenches or at home can befall a single organ, or it may encompass the entire person” (Simmel, 1918). For Ernst, and millions of other participants, the war had turned forever changed their world.
On May 15th, 1773 Klemens Von Metternich was born in Coblenz. Metternich grew up at the court of various German princes and never had a steady home location. He was sent to Strasburg in 1788 to complete his education at the famous University of Strasbourg where he studied diplomacy. On June 11th, 1859 Metternich died in Vienna, Germany. Throughout his life he accompilsed many great achevemn...
Joseph Campbell’s definition of a hero states that “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself” (Campbell 123). The concept of the hero has been present and in active use by storytellers since humans first began telling stories. Myths and legends of every culture and tradition have heroes whose purpose is to serve as role models and character lessons to those who hear or read their stories. The hero of a story can take many forms depending on the purpose of the story, reflecting the society of the writer. The purpose of post WWII German literature is largely to tell the story of those world-changing events as the individual authors felt it needed or deserved to be told at a particular point in time. As time passed, however, that purpose shifted in focus as the society shifted its focus in how the war era was to be remembered and dealt with in both politics and society. A look at the heroes of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar shows how the concept of the hero in post WWII German literature changed from the mid 1940s to the late 1960s in parallel to the societal changes in the interpretations and memories of the war that took place over the same years.
Addington, Larry H., The Blitzkrieg Era and the German General Staff, 1865-1941 (New Jersey, 1971)