The CIA Book Club

A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and EconomistLONGLISTED for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2026'This book reads like a spy novel'FINANICAL TIMES'Entertaining and vivid'OBSERVER------------------------------------The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere. It was a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the 'CIA books programme', which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden's global CIA 'book club' would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. Once inside Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. Latterly, underground print shops began to reproduce the books, too. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.Charlie English tells this true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. People like Miroslaw Chojecki, an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission. And Minden, the CIA's mastermind, who didn't waver in his belief that truth, culture, and diversity of thought could help free the 'captive nations' of Eastern Europe. This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.

Hitler, Psychiatriepatient:innen und die moderne Kunst: Ein unerzähltes Kapitel deutscher GeschichteAn einem klaren Wintertag des Jahres 1898 springt Franz Karl Bühler in einen Hamburger Kanal, um seinen inneren Dämonen zu entfliehen. Doch er wird gerettet und geht in die Geschichte ein: Als mit Schizophrenie diagnostizierter Maler der Sammlung Prinzhorn, einer Sammlung von Werken, die in Psychiatrien entstehen und eine neue Generation von Künstlern, darunter Paul Klee, Max Ernst und Salvador Dalí, zu ihren größten Werken inspirieren. Bald nach seiner Machtergreifung jedoch erklärt Hitler - der sich selbst für einen verkannten Künstler hält- der modernen Kunst den Krieg. Die Nazis veranstalten riesige Ausstellungen "Entarteter Kunst" und beschlagnahmen und zerstören die besten Sammlungen in Deutschland. Für Hitler zeigen sowohl psychisch Kranke wie Bühler als auch die moderne Kunst die 'Entartung' der Gesellschaft - und er beginnt mit ihrer beider systematischen Vernichtung, die zu seinem ersten Massenmordprogramm führt, der Aktion T4. Charlie English erzählt an erstaunlichen Lebensgeschichten entlang packend vom Wahnsinn der Zeit, der außerhalb der Klinikmauern um einiges größer ist als innerhalb und schreibt gleichzeitig ein Kapitel Kunstgeschichte neu.'Eine großartig erzählte Geschichte, in der Welten aufeinanderprallen ... Es gibt so viel Wunderbares an diesem Buch, dass man gar nicht weiß, wo man anfangen soll, es zu loben. Es ist abwechselnd fesselnd, tragisch, erschreckend und lustig.' The Times'English hat ein großartiges Buch geschrieben, spannend und thematisch mitreißend ... Es ist ebenso schön wie düster.' The Guardian

'A riveting tale, brilliantly told' Philippe SandsThe little-known story of Hitler's war on modern art and the mentally ill.In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world.The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder.Soon after his rise to power, Hitler-a failed artist of the old school-declared war on modern art. The Nazis staged giant 'Degenerate Art' shows to ridicule the avant-garde, and seized and destroyed the cream of Germany's modern art collections. This action was mere preparation, however, for the even more sinister campaign Hitler would later wage against so-called "degenerate" people, and Prinzhorn's artists were caught up in both.Bringing together inspirational art history, genius and madness, and the wanton cruelty of the fanatical "artist-Führer", this astonishing story lays bare the culture war that paved the way for Hitler's first extermination programme, the psychiatric Holocaust.