Twentieth-century Germany was characterised by extreme violence-unleashing war, genocide, and contrasting dictatorships of right and left. Dissonant Lives analyses the ways in which generations of Germans lived through this turbulent century and explores how, at different states of their lives, people interpreted, confronted, and responded to the multiple challenges of their times. While a stable democracy was established in the West after 1945, the Third Reich was followed by Communist rule in East Germany. In Volume Two, Mary Fulbrook explores the transitions from Nazism through the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to the collapse of communism and unification with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. Focussing particularly on the '1929ers'-those too young to bear responsibility for the crimes of Nazism, but marked by experiences of dictatorship and war-and on succeeding generations who lived through the GDR, she explores the perceptions and responses of selected individuals. In this way, Fulbrook provides a new understanding of the ways in which not only the structure of German society changed over the decades, but also the outlooks and character of Germans themselves. Book jacket.