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REVIEWS FOR EXORCISING HITLER:
"Frederick Taylor is one of the brightest historians writing today. His book on the Berlin Wall is truly fascinating and will never be equalled, and deserves to be read by everyone who lived through the Cold War. No less fascinating is his new book, Exorcising Hitler, about the defnazification of Germany that started in 1945."
-- Philip Kerr, Newsweek
“A deeply compelling study of the peace enforced on Germany by the Allied victors at the close of World War II…Hard-hitting yet evenhanded, Taylor’s work holds tremendous relevance for our time.”
– Kirkus Reviews (starred choice)
"Taylor is a great storyteller ... as a history of the occupation this is a great book. Filled with quotable quotes and memorable anecdotes, it presents a vivid portrait of life in Germany at and just after the end of the war ... Taylor's book is popular history at its best, essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Nazis and wants to know what happened next."
-- Prof. Richard J Evans, The New Statesman
"Lucid and harrowing ... Taylor brilliantly recreates the confusion of the war's final stage ... [the book] avoids a simple morality tale and offers a nuanced yet readable account of perpetrators and victims alike."
-- Prof. Frank Trentmann, The Sunday Express
"Frederick Taylor's compelling book debunks many myths about the immediate post-war years. Through vivid storytelling he shows that the story was far more complicated than has invariably been told in the English-speaking world.
Yes, the west and its values triumphed, but the road was rocky and there was a big price to pay – in East Germany, by millions behind the Berlin Wall who endured life under one of the nastiest police states in Europe. In the bigger, richer West Germany, as Taylor tellingly explains, it was paid by an entire generation that was largely taught to forget about the past.
Taylor has great narrative gifts, as he showed in his books on the bombing of Dresden and the history of the Berlin Wall. Here his account of the last days of the war is brilliantly told … this is an enthralling narrative about a crucial period of modern Europe's history."
-- Victor Sebestyen, The Observer
"Much memorable anecdotage in this readable tale."
-- The Sunday Times
"Taylor describes the extermination of Germany's governmental, political, industrial and cultrual life from 1945 through the two years that preceded the Marshall Plan of 1947 and the strong economic growth of the country in the 1940s until Germany fully 'awoke' in the 1960s. Taylor's story of horror, then of hope, is told with moral authoritiy."
-- The Times
"Exorcising Hitler opens with the americans arriving on German soil in September 1944. Beginning with the conquest of Germany, it gives a clear and engaging account of Allied rule, and shines a spotlight on the difficulties inherent in such a situation ....Hitler cast a shadow over Germany which endures. Such has been the ongoing difficulty with Exorcising Hitler that Germans have invented a compound noun, Vergangenheitsbewltigung, to describe coming to terms with the Nazi past. Taylor's insightful book, which ends with nascent Cold War hostilities being enshrined in the division of Germany, helps explain why Nazism left such a problematic legacy."
-- The Independent
"Frederick Taylor possesses a keen eye for first-person accounts. His style is authoritative, his account of the years between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1950s backed by considerable scholarly research. His prose is also a pleasure to read ... this is an example of popular history at its very best."
-- Liverpool Daily Post
"Five years of occupation, bureaucratic confusion and economic hardship ... are the subject of Frederick Taylor's absorbing overview of how democracy was reintroduced to the defeated Germans. Interviews with those who lived through the last months of the war and the first months of peace lend a quality of lived experience ... ten million German-speaking refugees were expelled from Poland, and along with the ones who had to flee Czechoslovakia, they poured into Germany. Taylor's eloquent account of their suffrering complements the better known story ..."
-- Hywel Williams, The Spectator
"Mr. Taylor ... has produced for the general reader one of the most useful recent works in the crowded field of postwar German studies."
-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Enthralling ... Taylor has a real gift for recounting his story in a vivid way, illustrated with all manner of telling incidents and detail. He provides a chilling portrait of a society struggling for more than three years without a workable currency, as its people shivered and starved in the gloom ... Taylor ends his informative and enlightening account on a typically judicious note, blending optimism with salutary caution."
-- Los Angeles Times
For an enthusiastic review in the Wall Street Journal of Exorcising Hitler (and of Gerald Steinacher's Nazis on the Run), go to the website of the WSJ.
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