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"'The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction." • Wall Street Journal
In 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.
“'The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction.” • Wall Street Journal
“…the new English edition provides a riveting window onto a society in ruins and a historical moment when the world held its breath.”” • Los Angeles Review of Books
“As someone who has edited private travel journals of Americans in Germany, I am very enthusiastic about this volume. I think we can learn much from the private journals of Americans in Germany.” • Thomas Adam, The University of Arkansas
Charlotte A. Lerg is assistant professor of American history at Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, and managing director of the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies. She is a board member of the Bavarian American Academy and has held research fellowships at the Library of Congress as well as at the German Historical Institute (Washington DC). Publications include The Continuity of Change. Reform Movements in U.S.-History (Dec. 2021) with Jana Weiß, and Universitätsdiplomatie (2019). Lerg also co-edits the series History of Intellectual Culture (HIC): International Yearbook of Knowledge and Society.
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Journal of a Conscript
Charlotte A. Lerg and Maren Roth
Chapter 1. Melvin J. Lasky’s Biography and Diary
Maren Roth
Chapter 2. Not a Beginning but an End: Melvin Lasky, Diarist
George Blaustein
Chapter 3. Between Denazification and Reconstruction: US Occupation Policies and Practice in Germany 1945
Jana Aresin
Chapter 4. Clio continues to serve. Melvin J. Lasky as Combat Historian
Charlotte A. Lerg
Chapter 5. (Military) Masculinity and a Feminized Europe: The Gender Politics of Lasky’s Diary
Katharina Gerund
Chapter 6. Lasky, Chronicler of Europe’s Twentieth Century
Michael Kimmage
Melvin J. Lasky: Diary of a Conscript
Appendix A: List of Primary Literature in the Diary