Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk,
sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's
assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed
sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a
two-room apartment in Rote Insel, Berlin's famous working-class
district. What makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one
of the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom of
twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll’s voice from
his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest of an ordinary citizen
to make sense of a violent and bewildering century. Peter Fritzsche
paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an
untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly seventy years
as history thundered around him. Determined to compose a
“symphony” from the music of everyday life, Göll wrote of hungry
winters during World War I, the bombing of Berlin, the rape of his
neighbors by Russian soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S.
superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries, Göll
grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and
Einstein, and later he struggled to engage with the strange lifestyles
that marked Germany's transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably
modern society. With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man's
thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the collective
experience of twentieth-century life, registering its manifold shocks
and rendering them legible.
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An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780674060951
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Vendor
Harvard University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter