Author: Herbert J. Stern Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1510758305 Category : True Crime Languages : en Pages : 561
Book Description
"Suspenseful...moving...equal to any fictional thriller." —San Francisco Chronicle In August 1978, the Iron Curtain still hung heavily across Europe. To escape from oppressive East Berlin, an East German couple, Hans Detlef Alexander Tiede and Ingrid Ruske, hijacked a Polish airliner and diverted it to the American sector of West Berlin. Along with the couple, several passengers spontaneously defected to the West, and were welcomed by US officials. But within hours, Communist officials reminded the West of the anti-hijacking agreements in the Warsaw Pact, and thus the fugitives were arrested by the US State Department. Thirty-four years after World War II, the United States built a court in the middle of West Berlin, the former capital of the Third Reich, in the building that once housed the Luftwaffe, to try the hijacking couple. Former NJ district attorney, now a judge, Herbert J. Stern was appointed the "United States Judge for Berlin." What followed was a trial full of maneuvers and strategies that would put Perry Mason to shame, and answered the question: what is allowed to people seeking freedom? Judgment in Berlin, also a major motion picture starring Martin Sheen and Sean Penn, is unsurpassed as a true-life suspense story, with its vivid accounts of daring escapes, close calls, diplomatic intrigue, and dramatic courtroom confrontations. The original edition won the Freedom Foundation Award, and this updated edition includes a new introduction from author and trial judge Herbert J. Stern.
Author: Noel Hynd Publisher: Independently Published ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
'Judgment in Berlin' is the third book in Noel Hynd's Berlin series.It is 1948. World War Two is over, Hitler is dead. The Nuremberg trials have concluded. The Marshall Plan attempts to rebuild Europe, though Germany remains occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet military forces. William Thomas Cochrane, an American intelligence agent, is in England with his wife, Laura, visiting friends and family. Bill Cochrane has accepted an invitation to be a guest lecturer for one year at the University of Cambridge. But when summer arrives, so does the first major international crisis of the postwar years. Under Joseph Stalin's orders, the Soviet Union employs the Red Army to block the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Berlin Blockade is retaliation for the Western powers' attempt to institute a pro-Western currency, the Deutschmark, throughout Germany, including Berlin, the former capital. The Soviets offer to end the blockade if the Western Allies withdraw the newly introduced currency from West Berlin. The Allies refuse. But there is no mistaking Soviet tenacity. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov proclaims, "What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany. What happens to Germany, happens to Europe.""And what happens to Europe, happens to the world," President Harry Truman angrily retorts in Washington. "If we can't supply Berlin by train or truck or boat, well, then, we'll damned well bring everything in by airplane!" There is no mistaking the irony: the United States may have been on the winning side of World War Two, but the postwar years quickly have turned old alliances upside down. Americans now defend the enemy capital they bombed just a few years earlier. Truman's words are barely dry in the ink of world newspapers when American and British military aircraft begin a joint operation in support of Berlin, the Berlin Airlift, one of the most iconic "peacetime" operations of the twentieth century. Military aircrews from Canada, New Zealand, France, and South Africa soon join the Americans and the British, flying more than two hundred thousand sorties in the next fifteen months. The airlift will provide West Berliners essentials such as fuel, fresh water, and food. But is it also a potential flashpoint for another world war? As the airlift begins, Bill Cochrane's phone rings in the middle of a balmy, summer night in Cambridge. The lecturing plans and a month of vacationing will have to wait. There are other events surrounding the Blockade and the Airlift that do not make the front pages, and those are the events dealt with in back alleys and dark corridors by men like Bill Cochrane.Cochrane's country is calling him back to active duty for a special assignment in the newly divided Germany, one which will take him behind newly drawn enemy lines and into a perilous netherworld of ruthless black marketeers, petty criminals, prostitutes, ex-Nazis, and Soviet spies.Cochrane has participated in dangerous covert operations in Germany twice in the past, barely escaping with his life both times. But now things are different. Onetime Soviet peers are now suspected enemies and an assortment of ex-Nazis may or may not be his new best friends. Old acquaintances from his previous visits to Germany reemerge, but why? An old gang of adversaries still lurks in the shadows that surround Cochrane's new operation, waiting perhaps for a moment of lethal payback.Espionage fans who read and enjoyed 'Flowers from Berlin' and 'Return to Berlin' will savor the return of Thomas Cochrane. Rich in detail, compelling in its re-creation of history, 'Judgment in Berlin ' is historical World War Two spy fiction at its best. ***"The Berlin Airlift was the first clear Soviet defeat in the Cold War. It's the one thing that the Soviets started and failed to finish." - Diplomatic historian John Gaddis of Yale University.
Author: Peter FRITZSCHE Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674037367 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
In this study of the newspaper page, Fritzsche analyzes how reading & writing dramatized Imperial Berlin & anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, & transience.
Author: Joshua L. Cherniss Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107138507 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
Isaiah Berlin remains one of the seminal political philosophers of the twentieth century. This book explains his enduring relevance as we face the challenges of the twenty-first.
Author: Frederick Kempe Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101515023 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 816
Book Description
In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War-and more perilous. It was in that hot summer that the Berlin Wall was constructed, which would divide the world for another twenty-eight years. Then two months later, and for the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only yards apart. One mistake, one nervous soldier, one overzealous commander-and the tripwire would be sprung for a war that could go nuclear in a heartbeat. On one side was a young, untested U.S. president still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster and a humiliating summit meeting that left him grasping for ways to respond. It would add up to be one of the worst first-year foreign policy performances of any modern president. On the other side, a Soviet premier hemmed in by the Chinese, East Germans, and hardliners in his own government. With an all-important Party Congress approaching, he knew Berlin meant the difference not only for the Kremlin's hold on its empire-but for his own hold on the Kremlin. Neither man really understood the other, both tried cynically to manipulate events. And so, week by week, they crept closer to the brink. Based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh-sometimes startling-insights, written with immediacy and drama, Berlin 1961 is an extraordinary look at key events of the twentieth century, with powerful applications to these early years of the twenty-first. Includes photographs
Author: Brian Ladd Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226467600 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
In this compelling work, Brian Ladd examines the ongoing conflicts radiating from the remarkable fusion of architecture, history, and national identity in Berlin. Ladd surveys the urban landscape, excavating its ruins, contemplating its buildings and memorials, and carefully deconstructing the public debates and political controversies emerging from its past. "Written in a clear and elegant style, The Ghosts of Berlin is not just another colorless architectural history of the German capital. . . . Mr. Ladd's book is a superb guide to this process of urban self-definition, both past and present."—Katharina Thote, Wall Street Journal "If a book can have the power to change a public debate, then The Ghosts of Berlin is such a book. Among the many new books about Berlin that I have read, Brian Ladd's is certainly the most impressive. . . . Ladd's approach also owes its success to the fact that he is a good storyteller. His history of Berlin's architectural successes and failures reads entertainingly like a detective novel."—Peter Schneider, New Republic "[Ladd's] well-written and well-illustrated book amounts to a brief history of the city as well as a guide to its landscape."—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books
Author: Jonathan Lichtenstein Publisher: Little, Brown Spark ISBN: 0316540994 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
A deeply moving memoir that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, upon arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behavior. As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin. Written with tenderness and grace, The Berlin Shadow is a highly compelling story about time, trauma, family, and a father and son's attempt to emerge from the shadows of history.
Author: Isaiah Berlin Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400846633 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 143
Book Description
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.
Author: Herbert J. Stern
Author: Noel Hynd
Author: Len Deighton
Author: Peter FRITZSCHE
Author: Joshua L. Cherniss
Author: Isaiah Berlin
Author: Frederick Kempe
Author: Brian Ladd
Author: Jonathan Lichtenstein
Author: Isaiah Berlin