'Postcards to Hitler' is the story of a Munich family living as close neighbors to the demagogue who will become the primordial commander of the Nazis-as passionately told by one of their surviving relatives, Bruce Neuburger.
As the story begins, Europe has enjoyed many decades of peace on its own soil and Jews are enjoying a social renaissance in the industrializing, urbanizing rising star that is Germany. It is not at all clear that this good fortune might begin to unravel. Benno Neuburger, a modest German land investor from Munich, and Anna Einstein, daughter of a cattle dealer from Laupheim, marry in 1907. Their family life begins at a relatively prosperous moment in Germany - and a particularly optimistic time for German Jews. Even when news of an assassination in an “obscure” Balkan corner of the continent passes like a cold wind through Munich on a warm beer-garden July day in 1914, people shudder but feel no great alarm.
What follows is a prolonged and bloody war provoked by inter-colonialist competition, which gives way to German defeat, a revolution, and a brief socialist interlude in Munich soon cannibalized by a merciless counter revolution and the pitiless demagoguery of defeated generals. Living amidst this swirl, Benno and Anna and their extended families in the German towns of Laupheim, Traunstein and Wolfratshausen cling to hope for a peaceful resolution to the a period of prolonged crisis. They struggle to survive as the economic and political climate becomes more difficult - but to no avail. Munich becomes the epicenter of German fascism fed by national resentment and racial madness, and their own families are caught up in the storms and terror that follow. Children turned refugees, a bloody pogrom, “resettlements” via train rides east, desperate acts of resistance, arrest and trials proceed as a Holocaust unfolds around them.
'Postcards to Hitler' is a deeply researched narrative history drawn from direct interviews and a mass of archival documents of great personal import, including the Neubergers’ final letters - describing daily lives in close proximity to the Fuhrer, and surrounded on all sides by a slow-moving parade of horror, until the perimeter between themselves and the Holocaust disappears.
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