About the book: 2015 / The issue of the magazine is dedicated to German memoir literature, telling about two totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century and about two powers - relatives in utopian crimes and disasters - Germany and Russia. And this special issue is called “Moscow - Berlin: history from memory.” The issue opens with fragments of the book “Autumn Milk,” quite unexpectedly written by an elderly German peasant woman Anna Wimschneider (1919–1993): work before the war, work during and against the backdrop of the war, work after the war. The fight for survival - and nothing more. It’s not for nothing that the book is called poor peasant’s Bavarian food. Translation by Elena Leenson. Next - “From Potsdam to Moscow. Milestones of my delusions" - fragments of a book by the German writer and communist, prisoner of Soviet and German concentration camps Margarete Buber-Neumann. In the second half of the 1930s. she and her common-law husband, a prominent German communist and journalist, live in Moscow among other figures of the Comintern. Before their eyes, terror is growing stronger and the monstrous essence of the utopia, which these revolutionaries - each in their own homeland - idealized with all their might, is revealed. Translation by Daria Andreeva. The next section - “Bag on the Head” - is compiled from essays included in the book “My school years in the Third Reich. Memoirs of German writers". And this publication opens with “Years in Debt” - memoirs by the compiler of the aforementioned book, the leading German literary critic and publicist Marcel Reich-Ranitsky (1920–2013). 1930s, Berlin. The Nazis are routinely and methodically killing Jews from the world. Translation by Irina Alekseeva. The hero of the memoirs of Georg Hensel (1923–1996) “Bag on the Head,” which gave the title to the column, belongs not to the victims, but to the majority: he is an ordinary member of Nazi youth organizations. But by the age of seventeen, thanks to banned books, he finally tore the “bag” of propaganda off his head. Translation by Olga Teremkova. And the writer, journalist and historian Joachim Fest (1926–2006) called his essay “Happy Years” because, in his opinion, what made them so was “a mixture of family unity and cohesion, idyll, deprivation and resistance...” Translation Anna Torgashina. The memoirs of the writer and artist Günter Kunert (1929), eloquently titled “Torment,” convey the oppressive atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that characterized the author’s childhood, since his mother was Jewish. Translation by Anna Torgashina. In “A Missed Opportunity,” the writer Barbara Koenig (1925–2011) regrets and is ashamed that only at the cost of her own adversity did the horror of what was happening in the Third Reich reach her, a very young girl: “I... have no choice but burning admiration those who are so sensitive that they can recognize injustice even when it seems like a “duty,” and are courageous enough to react even when it does not directly affect them.” Translation by Marina Ivanova. Rubric “The Banality of Evil.” An excerpt from the book “In the Gulag” by German wartime radio journalist Gerhard Nikau (1923) about his stay at Lubyanka. Translation by Vera Menis. Here are chapters from the book by the German writer and journalist Aloys Prinz (1958) “Hannah Arendt, or Love for the World” translated by Irina Shcherbakova. The circumstances of the life of an outstanding thinker, from World War II to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Including details of H. Arendt’s work on a series of articles for The New Yorker dedicated to the Jerusalem trial of Eichmann, in which the concept of “banality of evil” is introduced: “it has no depth, there is nothing demonic in it. It can destroy the entire world precisely because it grows over the surface like a mushroom.” In the section with the caustic title “Escape from Paradise,” chapters from the autobiographical book of the current German Ambassador to Russia Rüdiger von Fritsch (1953) “Stamp to the Free World” are published in translation by Mikhail Rudnitsky.“».