Bearing Witness
How Writers Brought the Brutality of World War II to Light
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Narrated by:
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Joel Richards
About this listen
It has been said that during times of war, the Muses fall silent. However, anyone who has read the major figures of mid-20th-century literature - Samuel Beckett, Richard Hillary, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others - can attest it was through writing that people first tried to communicate and process the horrors they saw during one of the darkest times in human history, even as it broke out and raged on around them.
In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores how across the world, those who experienced the war tried to make sense of it both during and in its immediate aftermath. Writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Theodore Plievier questioned the ruling parties of the time based on what they saw. Correspondents and writer-soldiers like John Hersey and James Jones revealed the chaotic and bloody reality of the front lines to the public. Civilians, many of whom remain anonymous, lent voices to occupation and imprisonment so those who didn't survive would not be forgotten.
The digestion of a cataclysmic event can take generations. But in this fascinating audiobook, Carpenter brings together all those who did their best to communicate what they saw in the moment so that it could never be lost.
©2017 John R. Carpenter (P)2018 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Where are the photos?
- By Cassandra on 01-17-22
By: Harald Jähner, and others
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Looking for the Good War
- American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
- By: Elizabeth D. Samet
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans - all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.
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Essential reading for military officers and political decision makers.
- By Arlene S. Burke on 02-23-22
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Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
- By: Alexandra Popoff
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.
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What? Nazism = communism?
- By James Messelbeck on 06-25-19
By: Alexandra Popoff
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Wasteland
- The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror
- By: W. Scott Poole
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.
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An interesting take
- By CN on 07-30-19
By: W. Scott Poole
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Berlin at War
- By: Roger Moorhouse
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 17 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In Berlin at War, acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse provides a magnificent and detailed portrait of everyday life at the epicenter of the Third Reich. Berlin was the stage upon which the rise and fall of the Third Reich was most visibly played out. It was the backdrop for the most lavish Nazi ceremonies, the site of Albert Speer's grandiose plans for a new "world metropolis", and the scene of the final climactic battle to defeat Nazism.
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A unique study of part of World War II
- By Mike From Mesa on 08-25-17
By: Roger Moorhouse
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War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Chris Hedges
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting the most basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.
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Powerful, perceptive, personal
- By Cx30 on 08-08-07
By: Chris Hedges
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In Europe's Shadow
- Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In Bucharest, Romania's capital, Kaplan discovered that few Westerners were reporting on the country - one of the darkest corners of Europe during the Cold War. In an intense and cinematic travelogue, Kaplan explores the history and culture of the only country in the West where the leading intellectuals have been right-wing rather than left-wing; a country that gave rise to the dictator Ion Antonescu, Hitler's chief foreign accomplice during WWII; a country where the Latin West mixes with the Greek East, producing a fascinating fusion of cultures.
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Wrestling with History
- By David on 03-07-16
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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The Bloody White Baron
- The Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
- By: James Palmer
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sadistic, sinister, and deeply demented as Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic with a penchant for Eastern mysticism and a hatred of communists, Baron Ungern-Sternberg took over Mongolia in 1920 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians.
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Truth is stranger than fiction
- By David on 01-21-10
By: James Palmer
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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War Without Mercy
- Race and Power in the Pacific War
- By: John W. Dower
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War - race - while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan."
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War without Mercy
- By rbergen on 05-02-17
By: John W. Dower
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The Korean War
- A History
- By: Bruce Cumings
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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In sobering detail, The Korean War chronicles a US home front agitated by Joseph McCarthy, where absolutist conformity discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent. Cumings incisively ties our current foreign policy back to Korea: an America with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home, the ultimate result of a judicious and limited policy of containment evolving into an ongoing and seemingly endless global crusade.
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A real eye-opener
- By Bookworm on 10-09-19
By: Bruce Cumings