“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Broken Lives is a gripping account of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of ordinary Germans who came of age under Hitler and whose lives were scarred and sometimes destroyed by what they saw and did.
Drawing on six dozen memoirs by the generation of Germans born in the 1920s, Konrad Jarausch chronicles the unforgettable stories of people who not only lived through the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, and Cold War partition, but also participated in Germany's astonishing postwar recovery, reunification, and rehabilitation. Written decades after the events, these testimonies, many of them unpublished, look back on the mistakes of young people caught up in the Nazi movement. In many, early enthusiasm turns to deep disillusionment as the price of complicity with a brutal dictatorship--fighting at the front, aerial bombardment at home, murder in the concentration camps--becomes clear.
Bringing together the voices of men and women, perpetrators and victims, Broken Lives reveals the intimate human details of historical events and offers new insights about persistent questions. Why did so many Germans support Hitler through years of wartime sacrifice and Nazi inhumanity? How did they finally distance themselves from this racist dictatorship and come to embrace human rights? Jarausch argues that this generation's focus on its own suffering, often maligned by historians, ultimately led to a more critical understanding of national identity--one that helped transform Germany from a military aggressor into a pillar of European democracy.
The result is a powerful account of the everyday experiences and troubling memories of average Germans who journeyed into, through, and out of the abyss of a dark century.

乡下女孩艾玛（Jördis Triebel 饰）继承了祖父的遗产，独自一人经营者农场，但因背负债务，过着朝不保夕、随时可能失去一切的生活。她杀猪前习惯用言语对猪进行安慰、爱抚。
汽车销售业务员麦克斯（Jürgen Vogel 饰）被诊断出罹患胰腺癌，将不久于人世。绝望的麦克斯从公司偷得一笔钱财，连夜驱车逃离城市，却因车祸昏迷在艾玛的农场旁边。
艾玛救下麦克斯，两个失意之人相互关心，继而相爱，享受着前所未有的幸福。最终麦克斯选择在这片农场迎接死亡的到来……

2008 film by Stephen Daldry

《茵梦湖:施托姆抒情小说选》讲述了：施托姆在德国文学史上占有重要地位，他和法国的莫泊桑、俄国的契诃夫是同时代人，也同为举世公认的擅长写中短篇小说的文学大师。《茵梦湖》是作者的名篇，其优美的笔调，清丽的风格，生动的故事，对人物细腻深刻的心理描写，给人们留下了深刻的印象。尽管施托姆的时代已经久远，但他的作品对今天的读者来说，仍具有很大的现实意义。
《茵梦湖》采撷了作者三则抒情中篇小说，其中除名篇《茵梦湖》外，《木偶戏子保罗》和《林苑一隅》都富有独特韵味，它们均为作者的代表作，我们从中可领略到这位文学大师的整体创作风格；它们也定会给读者带来和以往不同的感受。

2007 Documentary film directed by Werner Herzog