The streets of Berlin during the November Revolution, the Ruhr region in 1923 as French troops marched in, the variety shows, Germany's black community, Lemberg in 1941, and Hamburg during the bombing of New Year's Eve 1944 – these are just some of the places to which Michael Wildt takes us in his new book. He guides us through rear courtyards, private homes, and barracks, and he allows eyewitnesses like Käthe Kollwitz and Victor Klemperer, but also an unknown Catholic innkeeper and a nationalist teacher to have their say. No other work has managed to bring the "top" and the "bottom" of history into one collective narrative as intensively as this fascinating panorama of Germany and the Germans in the "age of extremes."