Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler's Germany

Rating:
Summary: Just us Volks here
Review: Schumann attempts to portray ordinary, day-to-day life in Nazi Germany, but has so very little to say about the fervor with which so many "ordinary" Germans adored their Fuehrer and embraced his "philosophy." No Holocaust here, folks, nothing to see but what's cooking and the top ten on the hit parade. Only the brown eye is weeping.

Rating:
Summary: Gives you a different impression of what life was like..
Review: This is a good, balanced version of events that took place in Nazi Germany. Willy Schumann writes about his own experience as a young German boy living at the time. I read the book for a research paper on the youth experience in Nazi Germany and what made this book stand out was that it did not take an extreme stand-point. The author was a Hitler youth member but he seems, even under the effects of indoctrination, to be able to do some thinking on his own -- he did not oppose the regime but he was not a rabid follower of the Hitler youth either. The book continues after the war and gives us a good insight into the plight of the Germans after the war. The book reads like a novel (which is not always the case in history books) and the author is smart and witty -- above all he is human.

Rating:
Summary: Gives you a different impression of what life was like..
Review: This is a good, balanced version of events that took place in Nazi Germany. Willy Schumann writes about his own experience as a young German boy living at the time. I read the book for a research paper on the youth experience in Nazi Germany and what made this book stand out was that it did not take an extreme stand-point. The author was a Hitler youth member but he seems, even under the effects of indoctrination, to be able to do some thinking on his own -- he did not oppose the regime but he was not a rabid follower of the Hitler youth either. The book continues after the war and gives us a good insight into the plight of the Germans after the war. The book reads like a novel (which is not always the case in history books) and the author is smart and witty -- above all he is human.