PositiveAirMail\"[An] informative and enjoyable study ... Everything was visceral, and Jähner conveys this intensity of experience to the reader. As he writes in his preface, Vertigo \'deals in the feelings, modes and sensations produced by the political attitudes and conflicts of the age; emotional manifestations such as unease, confidence, anxiety, ennui, self-reliance, a desire to consume, a desire to dance, a hunger for experience, pride and hatred.\' If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not properly explore the politics that gave rise to these emotions. But this has been done numerous times elsewhere. What Jähner, a cultural journalist, does, and does extremely well, is to take us inside the dance hall, the boxing club, the photographic studio, and the new open-plan office.\
David Stahel
PositiveAir Mail... comprehensive ... What, then, is the significance of the German winter campaign of December 1941–February 1942? Although Stahel poses the question in his introduction, he does not provide a direct answer. One obvious justification for this meticulously researched work is the number of myths it explodes—the most fundamental being the claim that the winter campaign represented a strategic victory for the Soviet Union ... Stahel has done a vast amount of research, including what must have amounted to months in the German military archives in Freiburg. His arguments are convincing, his prose always lucid. On the debit side, the fact that he is arguing against an interpretation which emphasized the \'significance\' of this period in the context of the overall war naturally diminishes the importance of his subject. One also wonders whether the general reader will want 560 pages on three months of war on the Eastern Front. Yet this is a serious work of scholarship: a well-argued piece of revisionist history, and a reminder that, for all the misery and slaughter in the West, it was even worse in the East.
