A European Past: Memoirs, 1905-1945 - Softcover

Gilbert, Felix

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393341917 ISBN 13: 9780393341911

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988

Synopsis

“Felix Gilbert. . .has incarnated the virtues of history as a vocation. Master of a variety of fields, from the Italian Renaissance through eighteenth century America to modern Europe, Professor Gilbert has contributed in each, works that stand as models of historical scholarship, rich in empirical specificity, yet resonant with a wider significance for understanding history as a whole.” ―William L. McNeill, past president of the American Historical Association, on the occasion of giving Felix Gilbert the Association’s first Award for Scholarly Distinction

Felix Gilbert begins this book of memoirs by describing his peaceful and protected childhood in Germany before the First World War. That war, and the revolutionary events that followed it, strongly influenced his choice of profession; he studied history at Heidelberg, Munich, and the University of Berlin. He gives a firsthand account of the intellectually stimulating and politically restless atmosphere in 1920s Berlin. During the first six months of 1933, when the Nazi takeover occurred in Germany, Mr. Gilbert was at work in the archives in Italy. There he received letters from relations and friends in Germany; published here, these letters convey the impact of Nazism on the daily lives of these people. In other chapters of the book Mr. Gilbert, who served as a member of the OSS, vividly describes wartime London, liberated Paris, and occupied Germany. These memoirs end with an account of a mission to Berlin which, for Mr. Gilbert, was also a search for what remained of a world that once had been.

About this title

About the Author:

Felix Gilbert, late of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was the first recipient of the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 1985.

From Publishers Weekly:

Gilbert refutes the notion, still prevalent among certain Germans, that Hitler's regime would have been acceptable were it not for his Jewish policy. In this pungent if impersonal memoir, the noted historian, raised in a family of Jews who converted to Christianity, looks back through a glass darkly. He recalls Berlin of the 1920s; turbulent years of revolution and civil war that hardly touched his bourgeois world. The lengthening shadow cast by Nazism is evoked through a series of letters reprinted here. Bleak, atmospheric chapters cover his exile in London where he arrived in 1933 and remained during the later German bombings. As an American officer in 1945, Gilbert was a member of the mission that determined the boundary lines that still divide Germany today. In measured prose he weighs the past against the present, linking his personal sense of dislocation to the ruptures of history.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0393341917
• ISBN 13: 9780393341911
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240