Students participating in the tour are required to read one of these books prior to the trip and make an informal presentation about it at an appropriate moment during the tour. You’re welcome to pick a book that does not appear on the list, but please discuss your pick with me first.

Non-Fiction

Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin: 1945 (Penguin Books, 2002).
A lucid account of the Red Army’s drive to, and conquest of, Berlin in early 1945. [480 pp.]

 Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
Garton Ash, a British journalist/historian, was the leading Western chronicler of the last decade of Communism in East Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe. The book is a memoir based on the author’s Stasi file and its narrative includes fascinating encounters with some of the people who informed on him. It provides a vivid picture of the inner workings of a police state. [256 pp.]

Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Harvard University Press, 1995).
[480 pp.]

Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Ladd explains how Berlin’s political and architectural histories have been intertwined with each other -- how the international conflicts that Berlin has been a focal point of, as well political conflict internal to Germany, have shaped the city’s urban landscape.  [260 pp.]

Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Explores the comprehensive impact of World War I on German society, industry, politics, and culture. [212 pp.]

Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Davis documents how wartime mobilization impacted the lives of Berliners, particularly women. [245 pp.]

Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Penguin Books, 2002).
Discusses the Nazi plan for the “final solution” of the Jewish problem, as laid out in the protocol of the “Wannsee Konferenz” held in early 1942. We will visit the villa in which the conference was held. [150 pp.]

Leonard Gross, The Last Jews in Berlin (Bantam Books, 1982).
Tells the stories of several Jews who lived “underground” in wartime Berlin and managed to survive. [260 pp.]

Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). [280 pp.]
 

Fiction

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
A classic. Set-up in Berlin of the late 1920s. [approx. 600 pp.]

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories.
Isherwood, a Briton, lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933; the two novels contained in this book are based on his experience there. The play and the film “Cabaret” are loosely based on these novels.