As the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography, written in exile, I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions. He was referring to the situation in Germany in 1923. It was a year of lunacy, defined by hyperinflation, a political system on the verge of collapse, and separatist movements that threatened Germany's territorial integrity. Most significantly, Adolf Hitler launched his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich--a failed coup that nonetheless drew international attention and demonstrated the Nazis' ruthless determination to seize power.

In Germany 1923, award-winning historian Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources from the time to present a captivating new history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr Valley in January to force Germany to pay the reparations it owed under the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War. For years, German leaders had embraced inflationary policies to finance the costs of defeat, and, as Ullrich demonstrates, the invasion utterly destroyed the value of the German mark. Before the war, the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the dollar. By November 20, 1923, a dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks, and a loaf of bread cost 200 billion. Facing the abyss, many ordinary Germans called for a national messiah. Among the figures to vie for that role was Hitler, a thirty-four-year-old veteran who possessed a uniquely malevolent personal magnetism. Although the Nazi coup in November was put down and Hitler arrested, the putsch showed just how tenuous the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, was at its core.

As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals, other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the emergence of a multitude of new movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, and of such iconoclasts as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar Republic was able to survive, and the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - This landmark biography of Hitler puts an emphasis on the man himself: his personality, his temperament, and his beliefs.

[A] fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country -- and, in Hitler's case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Volker Ullrich's Hitler, the first in a two-volume biography, has changed the way scholars and laypeople alike understand the man who has become the personification of evil. Drawing on previously unseen papers and new scholarly research, Ullrich charts Hitler's life from his childhood through his experiences in the First World War and his subsequent rise as a far-right leader. Focusing on the personality behind the policies, Ullrich creates a vivid portrait of a man and his megalomania, political skill, and horrifying worldview. Hitler is an essential historical biography with unsettling resonance in contemporary times.

As the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography, written in exile, I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions. He was referring to the situation in Germany in 1923. It was a year of lunacy, defined by hyperinflation, a political system on the verge of collapse, and separatist movements that threatened Germany's territorial integrity. Most significantly, Adolf Hitler launched his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich--a failed coup that nonetheless drew international attention and demonstrated the Nazis' ruthless determination to seize power.

In Germany 1923, award-winning historian Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources from the time to present a captivating new history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr Valley in January to force Germany to pay the reparations it owed under the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War. For years, German leaders had embraced inflationary policies to finance the costs of defeat, and, as Ullrich demonstrates, the invasion utterly destroyed the value of the German mark. Before the war, the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the dollar. By November 20, 1923, a dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks, and a loaf of bread cost 200 billion. Facing the abyss, many ordinary Germans called for a national messiah. Among the figures to vie for that role was Hitler, a thirty-four-year-old veteran who possessed a uniquely malevolent personal magnetism. Although the Nazi coup in November was put down and Hitler arrested, the putsch showed just how tenuous the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, was at its core.

As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals, other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the emergence of a multitude of new movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, and of such iconoclasts as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar Republic was able to survive, and the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.

In a bunker deep below Berlin's Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, took their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 30, 1945--Hitler by gunshot to the temple, Braun by ingesting cyanide. But the Führer's suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern history, witnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmacht, but the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich.

In Eight Days in May, the award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sources, including diaries and letters of ordinary Germans, to narrate a society's descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the north, residents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied Prague, Czech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reich, huge numbers of people were on the move, creating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home.

A taut, propulsive narrative, Eight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of Hitler's chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, revealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failed, as frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truth, however, the post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanity, an attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgame, but a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.

A riveting account of the dictator's final years, when he got the war he wanted but led his nation, the world, and himself to catastrophe--from the author of Hitler: Ascent

Skillfully conceived and utterly engrossing. --The New York Times Book Review

In the summer of 1939, Hitler was at the zenith of his power. Having consolidated political control in Germany, he was at the helm of a newly restored major world power, and now perfectly positioned to realize his lifelong ambition: to help the German people flourish and to exterminate those who stood in the way. Beginning a war allowed Hitler to take his ideological obsessions to unthinkable extremes, including the mass genocide of millions, which was conducted not only with the aid of the SS, but with the full knowledge of German leadership. Yet despite a series of stunning initial triumphs, Hitler's fateful decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 turned the tide of the war in favor of the Allies.

Now, Volker Ullrich, author of Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, offers fascinating new insight into Hitler's character and personality. He vividly portrays the insecurity, obsession with minutiae, and narcissistic penchant for gambling that led Hitler to overrule his subordinates and then blame them for his failures. When he ultimately realized the war was not winnable, Hitler embarked on the annihilation of Germany itself in order to punish the people who he believed had failed to hand him victory. A masterful and riveting account of a spectacular downfall, Ullrich's rendering of Hitler's final years is an essential addition to our understanding of the dictator and the course of the Second World War.

An accessible biography of Otto von Bismarck, Germany's first chancellor.

Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) has gone down in history as the Iron Chancellor, a reactionary and militarist whose 1871 unification of Germany put Europe on a path of disaster leading up to World War I. But, as this new edition of his accessible biography shows, the real Bismarck was a far more complex character.

A leading historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, Volker Ullrich demonstrates that Bismarck--the Founder of the Reich--was, in fact, an opponent of liberal German nationalism. After the wars of 1866 and 1870, Bismarck spent the rest of his career working to preserve peace in Europe and to protect the empire he had created. Despite his reputation as an enemy of socialism, he introduced comprehensive health and unemployment insurance for German workers, and he was concerned with maintaining stability and harmony far beyond Germany's newly unified borders. Comprehensive and balanced, Bismarck shows us the value of looking anew at this monumental figure's role in European history.

In a bunker deep below Berlin's Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, took their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 30, 1945--Hitler by gunshot to the temple, Braun by ingesting cyanide. But the Führer's suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern history, witnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmacht, but the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich.

In Eight Days in May, the award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sources, including diaries and letters of ordinary Germans, to narrate a society's descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the north, residents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied Prague, Czech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reich, huge numbers of people were on the move, creating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home.

A taut, propulsive narrative, Eight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of Hitler's chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, revealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failed, as frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truth, however, the post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanity, an attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgame, but a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.

Democracies are fragile. Freedoms that seem secure can be lost. Few historical periods illustrate this as clearly as the Weimar Republic. Fateful Hours tells one of the greatest dramas in world history: the failure of Germany's first democracy, culminating in the horrific rise of the Third Reich.

The Weimar Republic was born under an inauspicious star. Germany resoundingly lost the First World War and was hobbled by harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Continual crises--hyperinflation, violence, and political instability--shook the republic, only letting up during a brief period of stability in the 1920s. But the first German democracy was not always destined for failure. Historian Volker Ullrich proves that there were many opportunities to lay the tracks differently, from the founding phase through Hitler's election in 1933. Ultimately, the republic's fate depended on the choices of individuals. Thus, this history carries an urgent reminder: It is up to us whether democracy lives or dies.

Mit der DAT-Altana-Entscheidung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts vom 27. April 1999 wurde die Berechnung der Abfindung des Minderheitsaktion rs bei Konzernma nahmen auf eine neue Grundlage gestellt. Bis dato galt in Rechtsprechung und Literatur gleicherma en der Vorrang der Ertragswertmethode. Der B rsenkurs selbst spielte keine oder nur eine untergeordnete Rolle. Nun ist seit dem verfassungsgerichtlichen Urteil der B rsenkurs bei der Abfindung des Minderheitsaktion rs als Untergrenze zu ber cksichtigen. Die Arbeit befasst sich aus juristischer und konomischer Sicht mit der Reichweite und den Konsequenzen dieser Entscheidung f r die k nftige Abfindungspraxis. Auch wird aufgezeigt, in welchen weiteren Bereichen des Kapitalmarktrechts eine st rkere Hinwendung zu Marktpreisen m glich und n tig erscheint.