These have included:
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich 1945-55, by Harald Jähner (cultural journalist, former edtior of the Berliner Zeitung) about how those Germans who had survived (including surviving or having had varying levels of complicity in the Holocaust) lived through the decade 'after'.
The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961- 9 November 1989, by Frederick Taylor, historian, which details how citizens of the two Germanies and, in particular, East and West Berlin adjusted themselves to that most concrete of 'facts on the ground', together with the four-cornered geopolitical wrangling (the US, USSR, East and West Germany) that the Wall both occasioned and expressed.
(and currently - this next is as vast as its subject, so I can use it to kill insects and even small mammals if I don't finish, or even if I do)
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine, a sociological, literary and group biographical account of those who inhabited a housing complex - then the largest residential building in Eurpoe - completed by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to house the elite and those favoured by the regime. This includes a 40 or 50 page excursus on the nature, definitions and history since the Axial Age - a concept that this book is bringing into focus for me - of 'religion', 'cult' etc, as the author discusses how best to classify Marxism generally and Bolshevism in particular.
The last-named would’ve been worth the price of admission just for this re-reading of Judaeo-Christian scripture through a Dostoyevskian lens:
“The End was pre-determined; the Israelites kept making wrong choices; and the Lord kept blaming them for his continued unwillingness or inability to fulfill his promise. The world’s first heavenly autocrat was also, by virtue of his chronic theodicy problem, the world’s first Underground Man (or Adolescent). Constantly snubbed by his spiritual inferiors, he bragged about his great accomplishments, promised even greater accomplishments, nursed his many grudges, feigned humility, relished his ability to cause pain and thwart expectations, and fantasised obsessively about a spectacular public humiliation of the strong, the arrogant and the well-connected.”
As a believing Christian and a clergy spouse (my flower arranging is rubbish, my tea and coffee rota skills are so-so, my baking is 'on point'), I naturally think that there's A Bit More To It Than That - a helpful and pertinent challenge to be asked to articulate what, though.
(Plenty, perhaps more of which later - though there's also "of that which we cannot speak" etc).
Thinking about long, immersive histories, it may be time to try reading Gibbon again ("one must not say that one is reading Gibbon, always that one is re-reading him" - High Table folklore), though I can't imagine why anyone might be tempted to read a painstaking chronicle of the at first slow and then horribly sudden fall of a great Empire around now [heavy sarcasm].
