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Acclaimed author Andrei Cherny tells the gripping saga of a rag-tag band of Americans - with limited resources and little hope for success - keeping West Berliners alive in the face of Soviet tyranny, winning the hearts and minds of former enemies, and giving the world a shining example of fundamental goodness.

The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, was one of the most remarkable men of the 18th century. Born the son of strict disciplinarian Frederick William I in 1712, he was a most precocious and obstinate young man, and until he actually became king, he never exhibited any signs of becoming a military genius. But the young king displayed an amazing aptitude for military life and plunged into war with Austria over the long-disputed province of Silesia.

During World War II, in the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research; Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses—dubbed the Alsos Mission—and sent them careening into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany's feared Uranium Club.

In this remarkable history, we discover each of the individuals whose actions determined the outcome of the battle for Hill 107, the key event that decided the campaign to capture the vitally strategic island of Crete in May 1941. Drawing upon original combat reports, diary entries, letters and interviews, the battle is brought vividly to life. The narrative feels like a Shakespearean tragedy, the soldiers revealing their stories in and around the shadows of Hill 107.

Published in 1937, the result of 15 years of careful study since his days on the German General Staff in the First World War, Achtung Panzer! argues how vital the proper use of tanks and supporting armoured vehicles would be in the conduct of a future war. When that war came, just two years later, he proved it, leading his Panzers with distinction in the Polish, French and Russian campaigns. Panzer warfare had come of age, exactly as he had forecast.

An authoritative study of World War I's often-overlooked Romanian front. In contrast to the trench-war deadlock on the Western Front, combat in Romania and Transylvania in 1916 foreshadowed the lightning warfare of World War II. When Romania joined the Allies and invaded Transylvania without warning, the Germans responded by unleashing a campaign of bold, rapid infantry movements, with cavalry providing cover or pursuing the crushed foe.

Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler's enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany's military campaigns.

After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's diaries - only to discover that he had been a Nazi. The diaries show Api, a doctor in Berlin, trying to help the wounded in bunkers without water or light. Living in the ruins, he himself was near collapse. As Robinson retraces Api's steps half a century later, she tries to come up with answers to why he joined the Nazi party and reflect on German guilt while also remembering the happiest years of her childhood with him.

Juni 1940: Hitlers Wehrmacht hat Frankreich besiegt. Die Gestapo fahndet nach Heinrich Mann und Lion Feuchtwanger, nach Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel und unzähligen anderen, die in Frankreich seit 1933 Asyl gefunden haben. Sie alle müssen fliehen und geraten schließlich nach Marseille, um von dort einen Weg in die Freiheit zu suchen. Derweil riskiert der Amerikaner Varian Fry sein Leben, um die Verfolgten außer Landes zu schmuggeln. Szenisch dicht erzählt Uwe Wittstock die aufwühlende Geschichte ihrer Flucht unter tödlichen Gefahren, von unfassbarem Mut und größter Verzweiflung, von trotziger Hoffnung und Mitmenschlichkeit in düsterer Zeit.

Eine Darstellung der untergehenden Weimarer Republik, wie es sie seit langem nicht gegeben hat. In einem packenden Panorama schildert Jens Bisky, gedankensprühend und geschichtensatt, die Jahre, in denen sich das Schicksal Deutschlands entschied. Als im Oktober 1929 Gustav Stresemann, der erfolgreiche Außenminister, starb, fragten sich die Zeitgenossen, wie es nun mit der Republik weitergeht. Gerade formierte sich eine faschistische Koalition, die 1933 dann an die Macht kam; Bauern warfen Bomben, die öffentlichen Haushalte litten unter wachsenden Defiziten, bald schien das parlamentarische System gelähmt.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 160,000 Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than 5,000 remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to 1,000. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps. In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who spent the final 27 months of World War II underground, hiding in plain sight.

Have you ever wondered what was going on in Adolf Hitler's mind during his final hours in the Führerbunker? What were his thoughts as radio contact with the outside world grew faint, Soviet explosions became louder and louder, and he began to feel his unassailable power ebbing away? Did Hitler repent of his crimes against humanity or was he obsessed with thoughts of his imminent defeat and suicide?

An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.

To be an airman in the Eighth Air Force flying over the war-torn skies of Europe required skill, tenacity, and luck. Those who were shot down and evaded capture needed all of that and more if they were to make it back to friendly lines. These are their stories. Each is compiled from the original intelligence debrief written by the pilots or aircrew themselves. Bill Yenne details how a spider web of escape routes sprang up, created by the local Résistance.

The Making of Martin Luther takes a provocative look at the intellectual emergence of one of the most original and influential minds of the 16th century. Richard Rex traces how, in a concentrated burst of creative energy in the few years surrounding his excommunication by Pope Leo X in 1521, this lecturer at an obscure German university developed a startling new interpretation of the Christian faith that brought to an end the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe.

East Germany only existed for a short 40 years, but in that time, the country’s secret police, the Stasi, developed a highly successful “church department” that - using persuasion rather than threats - managed to recruit an extraordinary stable of clergy spies. Pastors, professors, seminary students, and even bishops spied on colleagues, other Christians, and anyone else they could report about to their handlers in the Stasi.

Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using "reckoning" in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely through time. Fulbrook exposes the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past" and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility.

At the end of September 1941, more than a million German soldiers lined up along the frontline just 180 miles west of Moscow. They were well trained, confident, and had good reasons to hope that the war in the East would be over with one last offensive. Facing them was an equally large Soviet force, but whose soldiers were neither as well trained nor as confident. When the Germans struck, disaster soon befell the Soviet defenders.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a steady stream of young German poets and thinkers coursed to the town of Jena to make history. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had dealt a one-two punch to the dynastic system. Confidence in traditional social, political, and religious norms had been replaced by a profound uncertainty that was as terrifying for some as it was exhilarating for others. Nowhere was the excitement more palpable than among the extraordinary group of poets, philosophers, translators, and socialites who gathered in this Thuringian village.