Reviews for French Wars 1792-1815

The average rating for French Wars 1792-1815 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-12 00:00:00 Joseph Stalin For whatever reason, I am usually drawn to "great men" history book instead of to those about the common people'yeah, not very leftie of me. Kohut's book might have changed that for me. There are probably a billions books about life during the Third Reich, but it bet there are few who pack a bigger punch than this in less than 240 pages'excluding notes and references. Far fewer, taking into account the book is divided into three more or less even parts: the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Postwar. The trick'if one can call it that'is that these sections start with two composed interviews'one of a man, one of a woman. For the most part, I usually believed everything narrated could have happened to a single person. The complementarity of the male/female perspective, and the multitude of references make clear that is not the case: we find ourselves in front of the story/history of a generation. I did not know this kind of historical work existed'and it is indeed a bit more highbrow than most of my history books'but I will be looking for similar works in the future. While reading the very necessary introduction, it was clear the targeted interviewees'of bourgeois origins, and West Germany nationals'could not give a complete generational history . I would have liked to see how workers'particularly those of left-leaning tendencies'lived the Weimar and Reich years, and how one coped with the Nazi past in the DDR. The book is a five star one nevertheless. If it is a great book to understand Germany's past, it is also equally excellent as a reference for its present. The conflict between the interviewees' generation and that of their children'the 1968 one'shows two Germanys that are at odds which each other and yet, they are also complementary. Most of the members of the former might be dead now, but their attitudes prevailed. No, this does not mean Nazism is alive and well Germany, at least I do not see it that way. Because Kohut does not seem particularly attached to the idea of the German Sonderweg, he seems to highlight universal attitudes'"kids these days have it too easy". Or it is simply that as a citizen of a state clearly at odds with its fascist past, I feel many of those attitudes are particularly applicable in my context.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-28 00:00:00 Michael Entler Thomas Kohut spent fifteen years conducting oral histories of 62 Germans of the World War II generation, summarizing his findings, and writing this book. Kohut has a background in psychology and history and he brings these two fields together to draw conclusions on how historical events impact the psyche of a generation. He concludes "Not only are the last members of the 'the greatest' and of 'a German" generation' now dying away, so too are he victims of National Socialism, including, of course, those who survived the Holocaust. At this point of generational transition it seems important to remind ourselves that what ultimately separates us from those who carried out and enabled the genocide is historical experience. We share human nature with the perpetrators and their complict bystanders. Two specific aspects of human nature seem particularly relevant in the context of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Although its intensity may vary from person to person, or indeed from culture to culture, all human beings have the need to belong to the group and to exclude others from it, a need that centrally motivated the genocide, in my view. And all human beings have the capacity to dehumanize others by closing off empathy for them, a capacity that enabled the genocide to be carried out. Moreover, the similarities between "the greatest generation" and "a German generation," as well as the differences between the German generation described here and other twentieth-century German generations, suggest that we should not count on cultural context to distance us from the Nazis. What separates us from those who carried out the worst horror in the history of modern Europe is nothing intrinsic to them or us. What separates us from them is "the grace" of historical experience. Kohut encourages readers to judge for themselves based on the evidence that he presents. If his conclusion intrigues you to learn more about how memory and action are formed by a series of historical events and in turn impact the course of history, read this book. Some of the essays are a bit repetitive, but overall this was a fresh way to approach presenting the findings of an oral history project to the general public.