@article{1478968,
      recid = {1478968},
      author = {Fritzsche, Peter,},
      title = {The Turbulent World of Franz Goll : An Ordinary Berliner  Writes the Twentieth Century /},
      pages = {1 online resource :},
      abstract = {Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as  a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or  publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice  cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or  schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment  in Rote Insel, Berlin's famous working-class district. What  makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one of  the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom  of twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll's  voice from his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest  of an ordinary citizen to make sense of a violent and  bewildering century.Peter Fritzsche paints a deeply  affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an  untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly  seventy years as history thundered around him. Determined  to compose a "symphony" from the music of everyday life,  Göll wrote of hungry winters during World War I, the  bombing of Berlin, the rape of his neighbors by Russian  soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S.  superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries,  Göll grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by  Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and later he struggled to  engage with the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's  transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably modern  society.With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man's  thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the  collective experience of twentieth-century life,  registering its manifold shocks and rendering them  legible.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1478968},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674060951},
}