While fear and anxiety have historically been associated with authoritarian regimes, Frank Biess demonstrates the ambivalent role of these emotions in the democratization of West Germany, where fears and anxieties about the country's catastrophic past and uncertain future both undermined democracy and stabilized the emerging Federal Republic.

Find the right words to make a point, seal the deal, or just keep folks listening! Chosen by the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, these words can help anyone who wants to be a more compelling communicator—as a worker, consumer, advocate, friend, dinner companion, or even romantic prospect. The book includes a colorful variety of words, including handy words of just one syllable (such as glib) and words derived from the names of famous people (such as Freudian slip and Machiavellian). There are expressions from popular culture (Catch-22) and words that date back to classical civilization (spartan and stoic). Each word is clearly defined and shown in context with quotations from magazines, newspapers, broadcast media, movies, and television. For many words, quotations from distinguished authors and speakers are also given and word histories are explained. 100 Words to Make You Sound Smart provides an enjoyable way to communicate more effectively, distinctively, and articulately.

This book focuses on a key aspect of the German question--the problem of German national identity and communist ideology in their historical perspective since 1945 and their immediate clash in the downfall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989. The book's theme might be summarized as German identity recovered. The book is unique in that it is in part an eyewitness account of one of Europe's most startling transformations. In the four decades of its existence, the GDR did not succeed in fostering a separate political or social identity, and thus an underlying difficulty of the state was never resolved. The overriding objective of the political socialization process in the GDR was to instill socialist political culture into the citizenry. This political culture had not only to be uniform with ideological imperatives and aspirations, but had to stand on its own because of the absence of a broader-based national culture. Given the newness of the state and its political institutions, and the continual challenge on the national question presented by the mere existence of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the East German Communist Party (SED) always faced an uphill task. This book should be of interest to students and scholars interested in Germany, in Europe, and in the fate of communism.