Germany

An enfant terrible shook up Renaissance medicine by denouncing experts and debunking accepted wisdom. Was Paracelsus as radical as he seemed?

In The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr discovers that it wasn’t just the men in the dock who had scandalous social lives and hidden agendas.

The Cold War forged new international relationships in which physical distance seemed overcome by ideological proximity. In North Korea, East Germany found a fellow traveller – and a fellow victim.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard Evans asks what manner of men made themselves the Führer’s ‘paladins’.

As the last living perpetrators are brought to justice, Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century by Tobias Buck wonders what purpose the prosecution of Bruno Dey serves.

In Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49, Daniel Cowling brings lost stories to light – some of them, at least.

Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust holds the ambivalent accountable.

Caspar Hauser died on 17 December 1833, but was it murder or a self-inflicted wound? Hauser’s mysterious death raised as many questions as his mysterious life.

The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933 by Frank McDonough is a lucid overview of Germany’s tumultuous interwar years.