Konrad H. Jarausch: Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century

In Broken Lives Konrad Jarausch offers a ‘collective biography’ (p. 3) of Germans born between the end of the First World War and the Nazi seizure of power. He approaches the lives and narratives of this ‘age cohort [of] Weimar children’ (p. 9) on the basis of over six dozen accounts, most of them memoirs. Those accounts are woven into an overarching narrative of a generally happy childhood in the Weimar Republic, adolescence under Nazi rule, experiences of war, violence and persecution, and rebuilding lives in a divided Germany. In many respects, the book complements the author’s 2015 book Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, aiming to read twentieth-century German history through the accounts of some of those who lived ‘ordinary’ lives.