Death in Berlin

We tend to think of death as a basic and immutable fact of life. Yet death, too, has a history. Death in Berlin traces the rituals, practices, perceptions, and sensibilities surrounding death in the context of Berlin's multiple transformations over the decades between Germany's defeat in World War I and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Evocatively illustrated and drawing on a rich collection of sources, Monica Black reveals the centrality of death to the evolving moral and social life of one metropolitan community. In doing so, she connects the intimacies of everyday life and death to events on the grand historical stage that changed the lives of millions - all in a city that stood at the center of some of the twentieth century's most transformative events.

'This is a first-rate and pioneering account of how Germany's 'culture of death' served as a charged intersection of the personal and political in the middle decades of the last century.' Paul Betts, University of Sussex, 'With great originality and alertness to detail and perspective, Monica Black explores how the dead were buried in a twentieth-century lifetime of mass murder. This is a history in which millions of dead cast a long shadow interrupted by dictatorship, repression, and defiance. It is a ghost story, about the persistent return of the dead in the imagined communities of bereaved, humiliated, and shamed Berliners. It is an artful perspective on the local, national, and mythic histories that make up modern life.' Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich, 'This powerful, haunting, ethically acute book puts at its center the primal topics of contamination and violated taboo, fantasies of heroic sacrifice and euphoria in the face of mortality, unrelieved grief, shattered faith, and dread of existential meaninglessness. Death in Berlin is a highly original, continually revelatory history of moral values and their malleability.' Dagmar Herzog, City University of New York, 'With the sensitivity of an anthropologist and the poignancy of a cultural historian, Monica Black probes the personal and social meanings of death. Beautifully written - by turns revealing, moving, and startling - this is a magnificent scholarly achievement.' Nicholas Stargardt, Oxford University, 'This is … a remarkable book that alters our perspective on twentieth-century German history … Black's book has overall significance for how we understand Weimar, the Third Reich, and Cold War divided Germany … In this wide-ranging survey Black paints death as a rich tapestry.' Mark Fenemore, German History

Monica Black is Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. She was awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize by the Friends of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, in 2007 and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council on Germany, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Council for Library and Information Resources, and others.