Books like Bloody Soil — picked by fans

There are many books about the glitz and the cultural icons that we associate with Weimar Berlin. This one gives us a broader and deeper picture. Instead of concentrating on a few writers and artists, it anchors the city’s creative explosion in mass-market newspapers and their readers, turning our eyes to people in the streetcars and cafés and the stories they read about their own lives. We can read about sensational crimes just as Berliners did, and we find the prototypes of modern art in the layout and content of newspapers and in the chaos of the streets where they are hawked.

This idiosyncratic biography of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a 19th-century German-Jewish Berlin literary salon hostess may at first seem esoteric to the general reader. A prickly, contradictory character, Arendt’s portrayal of Rahel’s outsider status as a Jew in a largely hostile Christian society, her proto-feminist self-affirmation of her womanhood at a time when women were essentially groomed for marriage, and her paradoxical mix of intellectual self-assurance and crippling emotional insecurities make for a riveting read. You don’t have to be Jewish or a woman to appreciate the complexities of this prototypical Berliner.

Peter Gay was a child in Nazi Berlin in the 1930s. I read his book to see what life was like there while writing my third novel, much of which takes place in Nazi Berlin. Gay was an academic historian but this memoir is deeply personal, laced with self-deprecating humour. His assimilated life (he and his father were staunch atheists) was relatively unaffected by the regime until 1933 when he became a Jew overnight by law. The Nazis quickly stripped the Jews of all rights, culminating in the violent Kristallnacht in 1938. He and his parents managed to escape to the U.S. six months later. Many of his relatives were killed. The underlying question in the book: why didn’t his family—and by extension other Jewish families—leave right after 1933 when Nazi plans became clear?

If you are Jewish and have ambivalent feelings about visiting Berlin, then this could be the book for you. Leonard Barkan is a professor at Princeton where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. A Jewish American, growing up in a secular New York family, his book is a personal reflection on traveling in the city. 

Berlin for Jews is part history and part travel guide. Barkan shows how, in the early nineteenth century, Jews dominated the arts, sciences, and public life and the way in which, despite the horrors of the Nazi era, they left an indelible imprint on the Berlin of today. The book, described as a “love letter” to the city, takes the reader through some of the most iconic locations of Jewish life and describes the long-lost elegant Jewish suburbs, salons, writers, artists, politicians, philanthropists, art collectors, and intellectuals. And throughout, Barkan muses on what… show more.

One of Rory Clements’ many writing skills is the ability to create tension and explore an angle of an historical event.

It’s London 1936, and the king is about to abdicate. A woman is murdered in Berlin, and a fascist-leaning couple in Britain are killed. I liked how Clements joins these seemingly separate tragedies into a memorable story. I liked his hero, an academic drawn into the world of spying, Professor Tom Wilde.

I think a great novel's elements are believable characters, forensic attention to detail, and terrific tension, and they are all here.

I loved this novel because the writer himself had fled Germany because of Hitler’s oppressive edicts.

There is a genuine authenticity I immediately sensed in each of the characters, and why not, since Feuchtwanger himself experienced first-hand the oppressive darkness spreading across Germany in 1933. Aren’t writers told to write about what they know? Feuchtwanger did just that, and it places a unique value on the novel, making it more a historical document than simply a fictional story.

My hope is many will read this novel and understand the dangers of fascism, so we don’t repeat what history has already taught us.

Nothing epitomizes the striking success of the Berlin Airlift more than the true story of the so-called “candy bomber.”

This was a USAF pilot who on his own initiative started dropping candy tied to handcrafted mini-parachutes out of his transport plane to give the children of Berlin a little sweetness in their otherwise bleak lives. His gesture more than any transformed the “terror bombers”—responsible for so much of Berlin’s destruction—into friends in the eyes of the Berliners.

This book is an autobiographical account by the candy bomber himself, Lt. Gail Halvorsen. It is written with candid clarity and heartwarming charm. A gem!

Milton does an exceptional job of tracing the origins of the Berlin crisis that culminated in a Soviet blockade of the 2.2 million German civilians living in the Western Sectors of Berlin.

The book starts with a look at Allied decisions and actions during the Second World War and describes how these influenced and shaped the post-war period. It does a particularly outstanding job of portraying life in occupied Berlin with rare granularity and neutrality. The result is a work that highlights Western hubris, failings, and mistakes as much as Soviet arrogance, deceit, and cruelty.

The book’s strength is explaining the build-up to the crisis (three-quarters of the book) rather than the confrontation itself. I recommend it as a good book to start with.

A true account of how the Nazis confiscated a Berlin business property belonging to a Jewish family and the actions taken to secure restitution. The story has a twist in that the claim for restitution could not be made until after 1989 because the building is located in the Soviet sector of the city.

The property was the business headquarters for a fur company and parts of it were leased. In 1937, the Victoria Insurance Company forecloses on the mortgage and transferred ownership of the building to Hitler’s railway system. The granddaughter investigates her ancestry and the way the building was lost, and then takes up the fight to obtain restitution. After several disappointments, she is successful.

I enjoyed the storyline because it is remarkably similar to what happens in my book. It provides another perspective of how the Nazis confiscated Jewish property, and only by reading books like this… show more.

I found this book of utter fascination. I read it twice.

The author’s character and reactions to the ravages of war resemble, to some extent, my aunt’s own behaviour. Stoicism, pragmatism, just getting on with it. Whether German or British, this generation of women had a strength and confidence that I breathlessly admire.

Whilst Berlin at the end of the war was very different from Manchester, there are definite shared experiences and thoughts.