German History Blog

Just one link today. It’s a video, and it’s a dandy, but unfortunately in German.

Never fear, your translator is here.

Please, at least watch the first nine minutes of this 40+ minute documentary that appeared on ZDF, Germany’s “second” public station. The name of the show is [...]

Here are a few links I came across today, and another video.

I thought this was cool: students at the Communication and Culture graduate program at Indiana University are going to be partying like it’s 1989 to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall.
The AP (linked via ABC News [...]

I’ve chosen a German book for this week’s Book of the Week. Unfortunately, Wolfgang Welsch’s Ich War Staatsfeind Nr. 1 (I Was State’s Enemy Number 1) is not available in English. That’s really too bad because the story is pretty amazing.

Welsch was born in Berlin in 1944. [...]

I’ll be posting lots of links in the next month as we come upon the 20th anniversary of the opening of the checkpoints in Berlin on 09 November 1989. Today’s textual links concentrate on what some might consider the true anniversary date: two days ago, 09 October. This [...]

Today is 9 October 2009, so that means there’s just one more month until the 20th anniversary of the opening of checkpoints along the Berlin Wall, which occurred on 9 November 1989.

This is just a short note to say I’ll probably emphasize this bit of history almost exclusively for the [...]

This week’s selection for Book of the Week is not written by a professional historian, but rather by an Australian journalist. So in one sense — the academic one — you might call it lighter reading, but it’s certainly heavy in the emotional sense.

Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from Behind [...]

I’m late to the game on this one, but I want to be sure it is mentioned here on the blog, so here it is…

The Anne Frank House has created its own YouTube Channel (YouTube – AnneFrank’s Channel) which, among other things, contains the only known video footage of Anne [...]

It pains me that I haven’t updated GHB since last Wednesday, and I probably won’t again until the weekend.  The reason is because I got a rush job for German-to-English translation of some very, very dense and difficult German.  It concerns psychological research and it’s just simply brutal.  Here’s [...]