The Constructed Mennonite
History, Memory, and the Second World War
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Narrated by:
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Ian Peters
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By:
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Hans Werner
About this listen
John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life.
John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Siberia. As a young man in Stalinist Russia, he became Ivan and fought as a Red Army soldier in the Second World War. Captured by Germans, he was resettled in occupied Poland where he became Johann, was naturalized and drafted into Hitler’s German army where he served until captured and placed in an American POW camp. He was eventually released and then immigrated to Canada where he became John.
The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.
©2013 Hans Werner (P)2020 University of Manitoba PressListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A significant contribution particularly to the canon of life-stories of Mennonites (and other Soviet Germans) who lived through the tragic years of Stalinist repression and the Second World War. Werner’s struggle with his ethnic identity as illuminated in the numerous name changes he experienced in his lifetime provides important and rare insight into issues of belonging and identity.” (Marlene Epp, University of Waterloo)
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Moscow 1941
- A City and Its People at War
- By: Rodric Braithwaite
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1941 Battle of Moscow, unquestionably one of the most decisive battles of World War II, marked the first strategic defeat of the German armed forces in their seemingly unstoppable march across Europe. The Soviets lost many more people in this one battle than the British and Americans lost in the whole of the Second World War. Now, with authority and narrative power, Rodric Braithwaite tells the story in large part through the individual experiences of ordinary Russian men and women.
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slow, repetitive
- By Wylie on 12-27-06
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The Wolves at the Door
- The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy
- By: Judith Pearson
- Narrated by: Patrice O’Neill
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 to follow a dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. After watching Hitler roll over Poland and France, she enlisted to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret espionage and sabotage organization. She was soon deployed to occupied France where, if captured, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Gestapo was all but assured.
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The narrator is ruining the book for me
- By Penni Khandi on 06-19-14
By: Judith Pearson
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The Art of Resistance
- My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir
- By: Justus Rosenberg
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, 16-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south.
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Rosenberg, Please focus
- By Jess on 03-20-22
By: Justus Rosenberg
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The S.S. Officer's Armchair
- Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi
- By: Daniel Lee
- Narrated by: Alex Wyndham
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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One night at a dinner party in Florence, historian Daniel Lee was told about a remarkable discovery. An upholsterer in Amsterdam had found a bundle of swastika-covered documents inside the cushion of an armchair he was repairing. They belonged to Dr. Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart, who joined the S.S. and worked at the Reich's Ministry of Economics and Labor in Nazi-occupied Prague during the war.
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good book; strange voice...
- By S. Hall on 11-15-20
By: Daniel Lee
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Invisible Heroes of World War II
- Extraordinary Wartime Stories of Ordinary People
- By: Jerry Borrowman
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Invisible Heroes of World War II documents 10 fascinating true stories of a diverse group of soldiers and noncombatants from all over the world, including African Americans, women, and Native Americans, who fought with the Allies during World War II. These heroes made significant contributions in the war effort, and sometimes gave their lives for freedom and liberty, often without much recognition or fanfare. All served with valor and distinction as part of the massive Allied forces who fought to free the world from tyranny and oppression.
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EXCELLENT AND INSPIRING!
- By B. ADAMS on 12-22-20
By: Jerry Borrowman
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Sons and Soldiers
- The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler
- By: Bruce Henderson
- Narrated by: Brett Barry
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1942 the US Army unleashed one of its greatest secret weapons in the battle to defeat Adolf Hitler: training nearly 2,000 German-born Jews in special interrogation techniques and making use of their mastery of the German language, history, and customs. Known as the Ritchie Boys, they were sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they interrogated German POWs and gathered crucial intelligence that saved American lives and helped win the war.
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Couldn't put it down
- By P. Voelker on 08-06-17
By: Bruce Henderson
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Escape from Paris
- A True Story of Love and Resistance in Wartime France
- By: Stephen Harding
- Narrated by: Maxwell Hamilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on official American, French, and German documents, histories, personal memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's key participants, Escape from Paris crosses the traditional lines of World War II history with tense drama of air combat over Europe, the intrigue of occupied Paris, and courageous American and Allied pilots and French resistance fighters pitted against Nazi thugs. All of this set in one of the world's most beautiful and captivating cities.
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Listen
- By MDowns on 03-07-20
By: Stephen Harding
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No Surrender
- A Father, a Son, and an Extraordinary Act of Heroism That Continues to Live on Today
- By: Christopher Edmonds, Douglas Century
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Part contemporary detective story, part World War II historical narrative, No Surrender is the inspiring true story of Roddie Edmonds, a Knoxville-born enlistee who risked his life during the final days of World War II to save others from murderous Nazis, and the lasting effects his actions had on thousands of lives - then and now.
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Personal and impactful
- By Rodney on 10-10-19
By: Christopher Edmonds, and others
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Che Guevara
- A Revolutionary Life
- By: Jon Lee Anderson
- Narrated by: Armando Durán
- Length: 36 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Che Guevara was a dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Jon Lee Anderson traces Che's extraordinary life from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro's government to his failed campaign in the Congo and his assassination in the Bolivian jungle.
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Encompassing and Fair Look at an Historical Man
- By Matt on 08-10-11
By: Jon Lee Anderson
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The Greatest Generation Speaks
- Letters and Reflections
- By: Tom Brokaw
- Narrated by: Tom Brokaw, a supporting cast
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The men and women honored in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation speak in this collection of letters from and about the Depression and World War II.
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Not for everyone
- By Sean on 03-17-04
By: Tom Brokaw
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The Boy Between Worlds
- A Biography
- By: Annejet van der Zijl, Kristen Gehrman - translator
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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When they fell in love in 1928, Rika and Waldemar could have not been more different. She was a thirty-seven-year-old Dutch-born mother, estranged from her husband. He was her immigrant boarder, not yet twenty, and a wealthy Surinamese descendant of slaves. The child they have together, brown skinned and blue eyed, brings the couple great joy yet raises some eyebrows. Until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands explodes their promising life. What unfolds is more than the astonishing story of a love that prevailed over convention. It’s also the quest of a young boy.
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Should Be Required Reading
- By Pam Pearson on 08-20-19
By: Annejet van der Zijl, and others