Excerpt from The Diagnosis of the German Obsession There is nothing new in this book; it merely represents an attempt to unbiasedly portray truth and record history, and it therefore deals solely with evidence and fact. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

“[A]n incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory . . . In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity—and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence against others. Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world. The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages. As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

Recounts the author's youth as the daughter of a professional musician, her determined efforts to acquire a rare German grand piano, and her struggles to restore the instrument when it arrived badly tone impaired. Reprint.

Annotation Between 1933 & 1938, Eric Voegelin published four books that expressly stated his opposition to the increasingly powerful Hitler regime. As a result, he was forced to leave his homeland in 1938. Twenty years later, he returned to Germany as a professor of political science at Ludwig-Maximilian University. Voegelin's homecoming allowed him the opportunity to voice once again his opinions on the Nazi regime & its aftermath. In 1964 at the University of Munich, Voegelin gave a series of memorable lectures on what he considered "the central German experiential problem" of his time: Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reasons for it, & its consequences for post-Nazi Germany. For Voegelin, these questions demanded a scrutiny of the mentality of individual Germans & of the order of German society during & after the Nazi period. Hitler & the Germans, published here for the first time, offers Voegelin's most extensive & detailed critique of the Hitler era. Voegelin interprets this era in terms of the basic diagnostic tools provided by the philosophy of Plato & Aristotle, Judeo-Christian culture, & contemporary German-language writers like Heimito von Doderer, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, & Robert Musil. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, & a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide. Hitler & the Germans provides a profound alternative approach to the topic of the individual German's entanglement in the Hitler regime & its continuing implications. This comprehensive reading of the Nazi period has yet to be matched.

During the First World War, delousing became routine for soldiers and civilians following the recent discovery that the louse carried typhus germs. But how did typhus come to be viewed as a "Jewish disease" and what was the connection between the anti-typhus measures during the First World War and the Nazi gas chambers in the Second World War? In this powerful book, Professor Weindling draws upon wide-ranging archival research throughout East and Central Europe to the United States, to provide valuable new insight into the history of German medicine from its response to the perceived threat of typhus epidemics from its Eastern borders. He examines how German experts in tropical medicine took an increasingly racialised approach to bacteriology, regarding supposedly racially inferior peoples as carriers of the disease.So they came to view typhus as a "Jewish" disease. By the Second World War as migrants and deportees had become conditioned to expect the ordeal of delousing at border crossings, ports, railway junctions and on entry to camps, so sanitary policing became entwined with racialisation as the Germans sought to eradicate typhus by eradicating the perceived carriers. Typhus had come to assume a new and terrifying genocidal significance, as the medical authorities sealed the German frontiers against diseased undesirables from the east, and gassing became a favoured means of disease eradication.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is one of the more complex and difficult mental disorders to diagnose and treat. Treatment of this condition is complicated by the fact that OCD shares symptoms with other major neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia as well as a spectrum of related disorders such as hypochondriasis, eating disorders, and Tourette's syndrome. Based on extensive clinical experience with more than 2,000 patients and exhaustive literature reviews, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Spectrumpresents a comprehensive examination of OCD, its related disorders, and their treatment regimens. In this book, Drs. Yaryura-Tobias and Neziroglu propose a unique theory for OCD that defines the condition as a complex phenomenon of unknown duration with a variable symptomatology that affects the individual's cognitive, behavioral, biological, and social well-being. They argue that OCD is not a single clinical entity but part of a continuum of related disorders previously considered to be separate. As a result, the authors advocate an integrated approach to treatment including family intervention, cognitive-behavior therapy, and pharmacotherapy.