Abstract
Reviewed by: Matthew Stibbe, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
As anyone who has been researching or teaching twentieth-century European history for the past 25 years or more will know, the world is not short of good English-language anthologies on Nazi Germany. In recent years, Richard Bessel, Michael Burleigh, Jane Caplan, David Crew, Neil Gregor, Christian Leitz, and Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk, among others, have made important marks. This new volume stands out, however, not only because of the very high quality of its 37 individual contributions, but because of its thematic range, up-to-dateness and intellectual sharpness.
Three overarching historiographical interpretations are developed. First, without denying the importance of terror (admirably discussed in Dieter Pohl’s chapter), the contributors generally lean towards the model of Nazi Germany as a dictatorship founded on social consensus. The sources of the regime’s popularity were manifold, and the contributors take us far beyond the ‘Hitler myth’ and the Nazi leader’s charismatic authority, essential as Ian Kershaw’s findings still are to current scholarship on the Third Reich.
Konrad H. Jarausch refers to National Socialism as an ‘upstart mass movement’ offering its own ‘organic’ vision of modernity as a means of ‘outflanking’ rival liberal and socialist versions (33). Armin Nolzen notes that when it comes to understanding how the regime exerted power in the years 1933 to 1945, the ‘will to totality’ was matched by an equally important ‘will to align’ (109). Jörg Echternkamp argues that rearmament and conscription in the 1930s went hand in hand with a process of ‘social militarization’ which ‘add[ed] to Hitler’s charisma’ (489). Richard Overy emphasises the ‘great expectations’ placed in ‘new, secret weapons’ like the ‘V-Rockets’ in 1943–1944 (241), while Sven Keller asserts that the ability of the NSDAP to command continued respect for its social policies and ideological programme ‘was the single most important factor in stabilizing the home front’ in the last year of the war (252). Elizabeth Harvey, in another nod to the ‘voluntarist turn’, highlights the important role played by volunteer Nazi women activists in policing the tight restrictions on contacts between Germans and the millions of POWs and enforced foreign civilian workers deported to the ‘old Reich’ between 1939 and 1944 (324).
Only Jens-Uwe Guettel’s piece, on ‘Work(ers) under the Swastika’, partially challenges the consensus model. In his view, proletarian agency on the shop floor, expressed through ‘absenteeism and slacking-off’ (125), meant that industrial wage-earners remained a class apart, even during the period of full employment after 1936. Pamela E. Swett, on the other hand, demonstrates how appeals to the ‘individual consumer’ through advertising and mass tourism helped to reduce class boundaries precisely by making bourgeois lifestyles seem ‘attainable’ by all (301). In this sense, the Volksgemeinschaft really did appear to ‘work’.
Second, several of the pieces stress the overriding importance of race to what Jarausch calls the Nazis’ ‘social engineering project’ (40). Isabel Heinemann, for instance, argues that ‘aggressive anti-Semitism’ and the promotion of ‘eugenic ideals’ both had an ‘integrative effect on the creation of a German “ethnic community”’, although she also admits that the sterilization and euthanasia campaigns ‘instilled a feeling of vulnerability and insecurity among Germans not (yet) targeted by the negative measures’ for racial purification (510). Lisa Pine, on the other hand, shows how destructive the regime’s policies could be for private life, with German and German-Jewish households often unable to protect even the closest family members against the horrors of communal violence, persecution and war.
Thirdly, the editors, in their introduction, rightly challenge us to think critically about conventional periodizations in German history, particularly when the Third Reich is inappropriately boxed into 12 short years only. For most contributors, this seems to mean identifying continuities and discontinuities beyond 1945, for instances in the spheres of family life (Pine) and consumer mentalities (Swetts), rather than searching for the historical roots of Nazism before 1933. Benjamin Ziemann’s essay certainly presents the years 1914–1918 as a ‘transformative period’, including in respect to the marginalization of ‘“alien” groups’ at home and the development of ‘myths’ about overcoming external forces hostile to Germany (in this case the French army at Verdun) by means of ‘extreme will power’ (47, 57). However, he also rightly rejects any straight path to National Socialism. Instead, he draws attention to the importance of the post-1925 era in the ‘formation of [a] radical nationalist constituency’ (58) and even then stresses that other right-wing groups – for instance the DNVP and the Stahlhelm – were the earliest beneficiaries of this trend, before being overtaken by the Nazis after 1929. Shelley Baranowski largely concurs, celebrating the shift in historical writing towards looking at Weimar’s ‘possibilities and contingencies’ (63), and not just its linear passage from ‘failed’ revolution in 1918 to ‘failed’ democracy by 1933.
There are some minor irritations with the volume. Although there is a whole section devoted to ‘Race, Imperialism, and Genocide’, there is surprisingly no single chapter outlining Nazi attitudes towards, or visions of, empire. The nearest we get to this is Alexa Stiller’s concise contribution on ‘Ethnic Germans’. The chapters on ‘Race’, ‘Gender’ and ‘Terror’ are great, but discussion of ‘sexuality’ appears only sporadically across the collection and might have merited a separate section of its own. In spite of the interest shown by the editors in extended chronologies of the Third Reich, there are only two short pieces at the end on ‘memory’ in the FRG and GDR, both of which are necessarily broad brush. For instance, Aleida Assmann offers less than two pages on the entire Adenauer era (1949–1965), a time when West German recollections of the Third Reich were surely at their rawest and most hotly contested.
However, these are small niggles only. Overall this is a rich and stimulating essay companion, well worth dipping into as an introduction to state-of-the-art scholarship, and with a remarkable amount to offer for university teachers and students taking modules on this period.