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Broken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did. Drawing on six dozen memoirs by the generation of Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany´s astonishing postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Written decades after the events, these testimonies, many of them unpublished, look back on the mistakes of young people caught up in the Nazi movement. In many, early enthusiasm turns to deep disillusionment as the price of complicity with a brutal dictatorship--fighting at the front, aerial bombing at home, murder in the concentration camps- becomes clear.

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"Jarausch illuminates the possibilities of history and consciousness through the testimony of dozens of Germans who struggled to make sense of their lives and the times they lived in. A very moving account of twentieth-century German history."--Peter Fritzsche, author of An Iron Wind: Europe under Hitler

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Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His many books include Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century and Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier´s Letters from the Eastern Front (both Princeton). He lives in Chapel Hill and Berlin.

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