Journal of Contemporary History 2011 Kurlander 920 34

Journal of Contemporary History

46(4) 920–934

! The Author(s) 2011

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DOI: 10.1177/0022009411413384

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Review Article

Violence, Volksgemeinschaftand Empire: Interpretingthe Third Reich in theTwenty-first Century

Eric KurlanderStetson University, USA

Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; 344 pp.; £20.00 pbk;

ISBN 0199276870

Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, New York and London, Penguin, 2009; 960 pp.; £12.99 pbk;

ISBN 0141015489

Tim Kirk, Nazi Germany, New York, Palgrave, 2007; 304 pp.; £19.99 pbk; ISBN 0333600738

Dietmar and Winfried Suss (eds), Das Dritte Reich: Eine Einfuhrung, Pantheon, 2008; 393

pp.; E14.95 pbk; ISBN 9783570550441

Roderick Stackelberg, Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies, London, Routledge, 2009;

416 pp.; £22.99 pbk; ISBN 041537331X

Peter Reichel, Harald Schmid and Peter Steinbach (eds), Der Nationalsozialismus: Die Zweite

Geschichte, Munchen, C.H. Beck, 2009; 496 pp.; E29.90 pbk; ISBN 9783406583421

Hans Ulrich Wehler, Der Nationalsozialismus: Bewegung, Fuhrerherrschaft, Verbrechen, Munchen,

C.H. Beck, 2009; 315 pp.; E19.90 pbk; ISBN 9783406584862

For at least 20 years after the second world war, classic interpretations of NationalSocialism emphasized the role of racist ideology, state-sponsored violence, and colo-nial aggression.1 This dominant narrative of a totalitarian police state founded onviolence and expansion experienced considerable revision in the 1960s and 1970s, asa younger generation of historians began to stress the consensual role of the Germanbourgeoisie and non-conformity of the working classes. The non-Marxist variationon these new social interpretations – the so-called structuralist or ‘functionalist’school – further de-emphasized the impact of racist ideology, terror and imperialism.Beginning with the work of Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat in the late 1960s

Corresponding author:

Eric Kurlander, Department of History, Unit 8344, Stetson University, 421 N. Woodland Blvd, DeLand,

FL 32723, USA.

Email: [email protected]

1 For three prominent examples, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York1951); Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (Munich 1963); Karl Dietrich Bracher, The GermanDictatorship (New York 1991).

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and reaching its apex in the 1980s, the functionalist argument returned to FranzNeumann’s early characterization of the Third Reich as a chaotic, decentralizedBehemoth.2 Even the most oppressive policies were viewed less as the extension ofHitler’s will and more the by-product of competing bureaucracies, changing circum-stances and unresolved Party–state conflicts. Admittedly, there were important var-iations in the functionalist critique of ‘totalitarianism theory’. Broszat andMommsen tended to portray Hitler as a ‘weak dictator’, who rarely intervened inday-to-day affairs. Ian Kershaw, by contrast, stressed Hitler’s charismatic leadershipand the fact that his subordinates frequently ‘worked towards the Fuhrer’ withoutclear directives from above. Whatever their differences, functionalist historiansoffered a more complex, variegated, less totalitarian vision of the Third Reich.3

The renewed interest in social history also brought attention to groups that had pre-viously been ignored by scholars of the ThirdReich.While a number ofAnglo-Americanscholars introduced the field to women’s and gender history, the role of religion – speci-fically that ofCatholics andProtestants – received increased attentiononboth sides of theAtlantic.4 To be sure, a more traditional kind of political and diplomatic history contin-ued to emphasize the central role of foreignpolicy,war, and imperialism.5But by themid-1980s all signs pointed to a new social and political history of nazi Germany, whichprivileged a combination of domestic political factors, personal and institutional rivalriesand ‘everyday’ history (Alltagsgeschichte) in explaining the Third Reich.6

2 Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of theThird Reich (New York 1981); Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (Princeton, NJ 1992); HansMommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC 1996); Franz Neumann,Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (New York 1944).3 Ibid.; Ian Kershaw, Hitler Myth: Image and Reality (Oxford 1987); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis,1936–1945 (New York 2000); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (New York 1999); also seeShelley Baranowski, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Beyond: Recent Perspectives on the Twentieth-Century Dictatorships’, H-Net, 2009 (http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id¼25615).4 See Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933 (London 1976); Jill Stephenson,Women in Nazi Society (New York 1975); Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman and Marion Kaplan(eds), When Biology was Destiny (New York 1984); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women,the Family and Nazi Politics (New York 1987); Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany(New York 1964); Joachim Maier: Schulkampf in Baden, 1933–1945 (Mainz 1983); Georg Denzler, DieKirchen im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main 1984); Shelley Baranowski, The Confessing Church,Conservative Elites, and the Nazi State (Lewiston, NY 1986); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion andPolitical Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford 2002).5 Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1933–1945 (Stuttgart 1990); Klaus Hildebrand (trans.Anthony Fothergill), The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich (Berkeley, CA 1973); Andreas Hillgruber,Zweierlei Untergang (Berlin 1986); A. Hillgruber, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1939–1945: Kriegsziele undStrategie der großen Machte (Stuttgart 1982); Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of NaziImperialism (Oxford 1989).6 See Timothy W. Mason, Sozialpolitik im dritten Reich (Opladen 1978); Hans Medick, ‘‘‘Missionareim Ruderboot’’? Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als Herausforderung an die Sozialgeschichte’,Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984), 296–319; Alf Ludtke, Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktionhistorischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt 1989); Detlev Peukert, Inside the Third Reich:Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, CT 1987); Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazism,Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason (Cambridge 1995); David F. Crew (ed.), Nazismand German Society, 1933–1945 (London 1994); Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds), Reevaluatingthe Third Reich (New York 1993); David Clay Large (ed.), Contending with Hitler: Varieties of GermanResistance in the Third Reich (Cambridge 1991).

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Alongside this growing interest in the history of everyday life, the 1980s alsowitnessed the emergence of a new conceptual paradigm: the ‘racial state’. As TimMason observed before his tragically premature passing in 1990, scholarly atten-tion had shifted from ‘national’ or ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) to the‘people’s body’ (Volkskorper), from a more general investigation of the fascistattempt to create a post-Marxist vision of social and political community to aspecific focus on nazi racism and antisemitism, eugenics and biopolitics.7 Thisrenewed interest in racism reached its apotheosis in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’sHitler’s Willing Executioners, which blamed the Holocaust on a virulent ‘elimina-tionist antisemitism’ that appealed to ordinary Germans, as well as nazis. In someways a reaction to the functionalist preoccupation with impersonal processes andstructures over individuals and ideology, Goldhagen’s book likewise introduced animportant revision to the ‘racial state’ paradigm. For in his specific emphasis on thedeep-seated pathological, popular and barbaric nature of ‘eliminationist antisemit-ism’, Goldhagen forced historians to re-evaluate the putatively biopolitical, tech-nocratic underpinnings of the nazi ‘racial state’.8

Indeed, the books and essays under review reflect a turn away from ‘scientific’racism, medicalized killing and the Foucauldian power of biopolitics, and towardthree interrelated trends. First, it is clear that historians once again see the‘national’ or ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) as crucial in organizingeveryday social and political life in the Third Reich.9 Second, in the wake of esca-lating ethno-religious conflict and global terrorism – and no doubt in response toGoldhagen’s book as well – historians have begun to re-emphasize the central roleof exclusionary violence and political paranoia in the nazi project.10 Thus, whilecurrent research recognizes, perhaps more than ever, the participatory, inclusiveelements of Volksgemeinschaft, historians also highlight the exclusionary function

7 Seminal in this regard were Robert Lifton, Nazi Doctors (New York 1986); Detlev Peukert, Insidethe Third Reich (New Haven, CT 1987); Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus:Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen 1987); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in theFatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York 1987); and Michael Burleigh andWolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge 1992).8 See for example Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York 1996); PaulLawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ 1992);and, for a more nuanced emphasis on the ‘racial turn’, see Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft alsSelbstermachtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg 2007);Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA 2008).9 See, for example, Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zurGesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main 2009); Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft alsSelbstermachtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg 2007).10 See again Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft, op. cit.; Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front 1941–45: GermanTroops and the Barbarization of Warfare (New York 2001); Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus,Social Outstides in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ 2001); Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: NaziPropaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge 2006); Alf Ludtke and BerndWeisbrod (eds), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20th Century (Gottingen 2006);Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford 2009); Alex J. Kay, Exploitation,Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in theSoviet Union, 1940–1941 (Oxford 2006); Geoff Eley (ed.), The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory,Nazism – Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor, MI 2000).

922 Journal of Contemporary History 46(4)



of grassroots violence, terror, and barbarity in ways that many functionalist scho-lars did not.11 Finally, much recent scholarship, undoubtedly spurred by the post-Cold War opening of East European archives, has returned to the ideology andpractice of nazi imperialism.12

Violence, Volksgemeinschaft and empire: none of these themes are new to the studyof nazi Germany. Nevertheless, in combination, they do provide a conceptualframework that helps us to draw useful lessons from the twenty-first century’scontinued fascination with – some might say unhealthy reification of – the ThirdReich and the Holocaust.

In contrast to an earlier generation of scholars who emphasized petty-bourgeoissocial resentments in explaining the rise of National Socialism, Richard Evansturns immediately to the dynamic role of racism, terror, and imperialism.13 In atrenchantly argued essay to open the Caplan volume, Evans insists that the naziswere motivated primarily by an internal desire for an ethnically homogeneousVolksgemeinschaft, supplemented by Hitler’s long-term vision of building apan-Germanic empire through military conquest and ethnic cleansing. Althoughthese were ‘extreme views’, Evans concludes, ‘the rapid rise in support for thenazis. . . would not have been possible had many Germans not shared at leastsome of their ideological commitments’ (46). The first chapter in Hans-UlrichWehler’s provocative analysis reflects a similar interest in ‘radical nationalism asfoundational constellation (Grundkonstellation)’, including the ‘regenerative’ tropeof a racial ‘people’s community’ and drive toward imperialist conquest (4–5).

Unlike Evans and Wehler, who stress the uniquely German roots of NationalSocialism, Martin Baumeister opens the Suss collection by pleading for a more com-parative approach to fascism. Roderick Stackelberg also pays lip service to National

11 See Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft, op. cit.; Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The NaziLeadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison, WI 2010); Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State:East German Society From Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, CT 2005).12 See Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler(Cambridge 2010); Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London 2008);Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York2008); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC 2007);Richard King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race,and Genocide (New York 2007); A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (eds), Colonialism and Genocide (London2007); Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (London 2007);Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt2003); Jurgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds), Volkermord in Deutsch-Sudwestafrika: DerKolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin 2003).13 See among others Rudolf Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism (New York 1970); Heinrich AugustWinkler,Mittelstand, Demokratie und Nationalsozialismus (Koln 1972); Robert Gellately, The Politics ofEconomic Despair (London 1974); Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany:The Urban Master Artisans, 1873–1896 (Princeton, NJ 1978). For slight revisions to this petty bourgeoisthesis that still emphasize the social bases for nazism, see Jurgen Falter, Hitler’s Wahler (Munchen1991); Karl Rohe, Elections, Parties, and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German Parties andParty systems 1867–1987 (New York 1990); Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundationsof Fascism in Germany,1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC 1983); Richard Hamilton, Who Voted For Hitler?(Princeton, NJ 1982).

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Socialism as a more extreme version of the fascist European ‘norm’, but ultimatelyinsists on Germany’s ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) to fascism.14 Stackelberg’s ‘socialimperialist’ focus on the manipulation of radical nationalism and imperialism byconservative elites has experienced significant criticism over the last 30 years. Still,the relative lack of consideration in most of the selections under review of the right-wing aristocrats and industrialists who helped the nazis into power suggests that thependulum may have swung too far in a revisionist direction.15

In fact, with the notable exception of Kirk and Stackelberg, the numerous polit-ical and economic challenges facing the Weimar Republic are given scarce attentionin these volumes. Most contributions, of which Peter Fritzsche’s essay in theCaplan volume is typical, underscore the powerful attraction of ordinaryGermans to the nazi articulation of ‘people’s community’. Following Wehler andEvans, Fritzsche believes that the ‘unifying ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft’ (63)fuelled the NSDAP’s effective ‘political mobilization’ already prior to the GreatDepression, preparing the ground for the electoral ‘breakthrough’ of the 1930s.

Turning to the period after the nazi ‘seizure of power’, both Jeremy Noakes andTim Kirk note the fraught reality of day-to-day politics, which were defined by thepolycratic competition between Party and state and the proliferation of bureau-cracies with overlapping responsibilities. Likewise, following the basic outline ofthe functionalist argument, Armin Nolzen and Christiane Kuller in Suss’s collec-tion recall Ernst Fraenkel’s famous characterization of the Third Reich as a ‘dualstate’, divided between a traditional, less nazified civil service that followedaccepted legal ‘norms’ and a proliferation of extraordinary offices and commissionsthat proposed additional ‘measures’ emanating from the upper echelons of theNSDAP.

Nevertheless, most of the authors prefer Kershaw’s concept of a ‘charismatic Fuhrer’to Mommsen’s idea that Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’. Here Nolzen observes thegrowing compatibility of Party and state in cementing Hitler’s role as Fuhrer,while Kuller insists that ‘Hitler embodied the unquestioned power at the center ofthis administrative chaos’ (233), yielding a ‘battle-ready administration [kampfende

14 For classic examples of this ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) argument, see George Mosse, The Crisis ofGerman Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York 1998); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, TheGerman Empire 1871–1918 (Providence, RI 1993); Winkler, Mittelstand, Demokratie, op. cit.; Hans-Jurgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus in Wilhelminischen Reich1893–1914: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse des Nationalismus in Deutschland am Beispiel des Bundes derLandwirte und der Deutsch-Konservativen Partei (Bonn 1975).15 Among the earliest and most effective critiques of this interpretation, see David Blackbourn andGeoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-CenturyGermany (New York 1984); Henry Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New Haven, CT1984); Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (Oxford 1987);Richard J. Evans, Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany And The Origins Of TheThird Reich (London 1987); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and PoliticalChange After Bismarck (Ann Arbor, MI 1984; repr. 1990). For a recent collection of essays that bringssome of the older questions regarding elites back into the discussion, see Mark Roseman, Frank Biessand Hanna Schissler (eds), Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History(New York and Oxford 2007).




Verwaltung]’ that learned rather quickly to work towards the Fuhrer. Nomatter howchaotic it seemed, this ‘system of terror and domination’ (242) functioned effectivelyuntil the very end of the war. Hence most of the works under review attempt tobalance the role of Hitler’s intentions and structural constraints, coercion and con-sent, exclusionary violence and an inclusive vision of ‘national community’, in orderto paint a more nuanced picture of nazi state and society.16

Indeed, Tim Mason would be pleased to see the concept of Volksgemeinschafthas made a comeback in contemporary interpretations of the Third Reich.Everyone acknowledges that ordinary Germans were well aware of the nazipolice apparatus; and yet, most of the scholars under review agree that Germansgenuinely wanted to participate in the ‘national’ or ‘people’s community’. TheGestapo, as Nicholas Wachsmann reminds us in the Caplan volume, spent mostof its time rounding up internal ‘security’ threats such as communists, Jews, ‘aso-cials’ and the putatively biologically inferior, not ordinary middle- and working-class Germans (125–6). Nolzen adds that the Volksgemeinschaft developed a realityof its own, founded on both the ‘diverse chances for social mobility’ and ‘socialdeath for all those who did not belong to the NSDAP’ (74). Although relativelysuperficial and buttressed by an underlying fear of persecution, Kirk notes, thissocio-political consensus was founded upon real improvements in quality of life,including economic recovery and generous welfare programs.

In a penetrating contribution to the Suss volume, Waltraud Sennebogen agrees,arguing that the nazis’ successful co-ordination of speech after 1933 occurred lessthrough outright legal coercion than the careful manipulation of culture and lan-guage. After firing many left-wing and Jewish journalists during the first months ofthe regime, the nazis employed more subtle means to create a ‘public spheredeformed by dictatorship’ (166), namely ‘militarizing’, politicizing and ultimatelyradicalizing everyday language. It was precisely in this realm of everyday discourse,however, that one finds the greatest non-conformity, as liberal papers publishedveiled criticisms, omitted news items, or failed to employ the typical nazified lan-guage. The nazis also couldn’t control the way that political propagandawas received; including the possibility that it might be misread or rejected.Tim Kirk’s chapter on ‘Culture, Leisure, and Propaganda’ is particularly effectivein illustrating the alternating mix of apolitical entertainment, which drew on thevibrant consumer culture of the 1920s, and carefully orchestrated aestheticizationof politics that informed nazi efforts to create a coherent ‘people’s community’.

The complex interplay between ideology and pragmatism becomes evident innazi attitudes toward women as well. Though initially focused on increasing thebirth-rate and pushing women back into the home, Sybille Steinbacher argues inthe Suss volume, the nazis eventually made numerous concessions to economicreality, encouraging women’s employment and education. For ideological as wellas pragmatic reasons, many women embraced these opportunities to take an active

16 See Michael Wildt, ‘Die Epochenzasur 1989/90 und die NS-Historiographie’, ZeithistorischeForschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 5 (2008) H. 3; also see Baranowski,‘Fascism, Totalitarianism’, op. cit.

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part in the ‘people’s community’. In a clear and informative chapter on‘Reproduction, the Family and Racial Hygiene’, Kirk does an effective job ofcontextualizing nazi policies toward women within the longue duree of Germanhistory. The nazis, it turns out, were neither particularly original nor consistent intheir attitudes toward women and the family, vacillating between conservative,chauvinist views prevalent in Imperial Germany and more ‘liberal’ interventionistpolicies characteristic of the Weimar Republic. Even in the realm of eugenics andlegalized homophobia, Kirk notes, the nazis drew opportunistically on pre-existingideologies, institutions, and legal frameworks. While the nazi emphasis on biopo-litics continues to inform all these works, then, the numerous ambivalences, con-tradictions, and pre-1933 continuities in nazi attitudes toward ethnicity, gender,and sexuality reflect the emerging fissures in the ‘racial state’ paradigm.

These ambivalences become immediately apparent in Richard Steigmann-Gall’scontribution on the churches in Caplan’s edited collection. Although many nazisgrew increasingly hostile to traditional Christianity, Protestants and Catholics ‘werenever the subjects of nazi persecution as such’ (167). Nor were they consistent oppo-nents of the regime, adds Christoph Kosters in his informative essay from the Sussvolume. Torn theologically between accepting the regime’s pervasive antisemitismand defending the Old Testament, Christian ambivalence was further reflected in thepractical political contrast between the courageous opposition of individual Catholicand Protestant clergy to the euthanasia program and the relative passivity of bothchurches in regard to the ‘Final Solution’. Turning to the academy, Wehler stressesthe degree to which the nazi ‘fusion of faith in science and archaic elements’ (159) ledto a politicization of intellectual and scientific life, particularly in the realm of biol-ogy and eugenics. Still, Rudiger Hachtmann in Suss’s volume suggests that theregime failed, for the most part, in ‘co-ordinating’ science and the academy.

Hence most of the contributions under review counter an older historiographythat portrays the victory of National Socialism as a true socio-biological revolu-tion. Despite the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, write Winfried and Dietmar Suss, thenazis operated pragmatically, exploiting and reinforcing existing social hierarchiesand traditional economic organizations. Contrary to the nazis’ anti-capitalist,‘blood and soil’ rhetoric, for example, big business tended to thrive after 1933.Instead, it was Germany’s vaunted agricultural and handicraft industries that stag-nated and the lower middle classes (Mittelstand) who became frustrated as a result.In his contribution to the same volume, Michael Schneider agrees that nazi inter-ventions in the free market economy were less stark than one might imagine. Mostentrepreneurs served the rearmament drive opportunistically, assuming that thecapitalist economy would soon return to ‘normalcy’ (189); that is, that governmentmilitary contracts would eventually be replaced by consumer-driven demand. Evenduring the war, Schneider suggests, massive increases in production had more to dowith businesses reorganizing their own firms in pursuit of profits, rather than thetop-down imposition of Albert Speer’s rationalization schemes. Most ofGermany’s initial employment boom, Kirk adds, was a legacy of financial reformsand a general global recovery begun already in the last year of the Weimar




Republic; a recovery which quickly dissipated in the wake of rampant inflation andlabour shortages resulting from accelerated rearmament. Despite the regime’somnipresent rhetoric of ‘racial community’ and ‘national revolution’, the promisedimprovements in social mobility and living standards never materialized.

But in his contribution to the Caplan volume, Adam Tooze disagrees with thispessimistic appraisal of nazi social and economic interventions, arguing that theThird Reich made a sincere and initially successful effort to improve living stan-dards and resolve class conflicts. In fact, Tooze’s narrative tends to follow TimMason’s economic chronology of the Third Reich: three years of genuine recoveryfounded on a productive alliance with big business and labor-friendly social pol-icies, followed by an increasingly aggressive rearmament programme that hinderedcorporate profits, working-class wages, and consumer satisfaction. Tooze does notgo quite so far as Mason in insisting that the decision for war in summer 1939 wasprimarily the result of political and economic pressures resulting from a balance ofpayments crisis.17 Nor does he view the drive toward imperialist war, plunder, andgenocide as exclusively a means of financing social solidarity at home.18

Nevertheless, his essay does reflect an emerging consensus that nazi visions ofempire, racial and economic alike, play an important role in understanding theorigins of the second world war and genocidal policies that accompanied it.19

The quintessentially imperialist nature of nazi foreign policy takes center stage inRichard Evans’s masterful account of the Third Reich at War, his third and lastvolume in the series. In a welcome departure from traditional military and diplomatichistories of the second world war, Evans expertly traces the construction of empire,from the level of political, diplomatic, and military leadership in Berlin to the every-day social and economic consequences for millions of Jews, Poles and Frenchmen.Though recognizing the complex political and economic realities that undergirdedday-to-day decision-making, Evans views Hitler’s pre-existing plan for a ‘racial reor-dering of Eastern Europe’ (225) as the overarching geopolitical impetus behind naziforeign policy. Like Evans, Wehler privileges the role of Hitler’s ideology and inten-tions, proposing a direct relationship between the German Fuhrer’s stated goals in the1920s and his push toward rapid rearmament, war and genocide after 1933. At leastin regard to the imperialist origins of the second world war, these two veterans of the1980s Sonderweg debate appear to have arrived at a surprising level of consensus.

Adam Tooze accepts that the driving force behind nazi domestic and foreignpolicy was Hitler and Himmler’s desire to build a racially homogeneous Germanicempire in the East. Yet Tooze insists that economic realities – including foodshortages and the fact that German living standards lagged behind those ofBritain, France, and the United States – both fueled and defined the pattern ofnazi aggression. Hitler was convinced that Germany could not compete

17 See Tim Mason, ‘Some Origins of the Second World War’, in Caplan (ed.), Nazism, op. cit., 33–52.18 Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, op. cit.19 Again, see Baranowski, Nazi Empire, op. cit.; Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, op. cit.; Tooze, Wages ofDestruction, op. cit.; Lower, Nazi Empire-Building, op. cit.; Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, op. cit.

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economically or militarily with the other great powers until it had a contiguousempire of its own. Consequently, Tooze views the decision to go to war inSeptember 1939, as well as the multiple shifts in strategy and distribution ofresources thereafter, as a function of the complex interplay between racial-imperi-alist ideology on the one hand and a keen recognition of economic and geopoliticalrealities on the other: what Tooze calls an ‘ideological-pragmatic synthesis’ (194).In their respective contributions to the Caplan and Suss volumes, GerhardWeinberg and Phillip Gassert largely concur, attributing seeming inconsistenciesand opportunism that defined the first few years of Hitler’s foreign policy to var-ious internal and external constraints. Hitler’s careful, even occasionally bilateral,dismantling of the remnants of Versailles, not to mention his seeming indecisionafter the war broke out in 1939, should not distract us from the long-term plans ofimperial conquest and ethnic cleansing that underlay virtually all his decisions.

The contributions to the Suss collection tend to follow the general outline ofTooze’s ‘ideological-pragmatic synthesis’. Acknowledging that economic pressure toacquire cheap land, labor, and resources in the East helped provoke Hitler’s inva-sion of Poland in September 1939, Winfried and Dietmar Suss remind us that anideological vision of ‘a racist social utopia’ (96), founded upon a Jew-free Europe,was the chief impetus for war among the party faithful. Thomas Schlemmer’s unvar-nished appraisal of the German Wehrmacht leaves no doubt that the armed forcesplayed an integral part in nazi policies of occupation and extermination, rapidly‘degenerat[ing] from an indispensable partner [of the regime] with a great degree ofinternal autonomy’ to the loyal ‘sword of the Fuhrer’ (264). Looking at Germanoccupation policy more generally, Dieter Pohl follows Wehler, Stackelberg, and,most recently, Shelley Baranowski in noting the geopolitical parallels between pre-first world war imperialism and nazi designs on acquiring ‘living space’ after 1939.20

At the same time, Pohl is careful to insist that nazi imperialism was much moreradical, violent, and systematic, extending far beyond a mere revision of theVersailles Treaty. As Tim Kirk observes in his own chapter on nazi foreign policyand the second world war, ‘Violence had been the defining characteristic of nazismfrom its rowdy beginnings in Munich, and war had been the central objective. . . naziideology glorified violence in the struggle for survival and supremacy. . . and saw waras the test of the nation’ (218) – a test Germany ultimately failed.

In approaching antisemitism and the Holocaust, the volumes under review reflect arelative consensus around the moderate functionalist interpretation of ChristopherBrowning, but one now firmly embedded in the wider context of nazi imperialdesigns.21 In their respective chapters on the Holocaust, Tim Kirk and AlanSteinweis, the only non-German contributor to the Suss volume, offer concise over-views illustrating that antisemitism was a necessary but insufficient factor in

20 See again, Baranowski, Nazi Empire, op. cit.; Hillgruber, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1939–1945, op. cit.;Smith, Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, op. cit.21 See Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi JewishPolicy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, NE 2004); Idem, The Path to Genocide: Essays onLaunching the Final Solution (Cambridge 1998).




determining nazi anti-Jewish measures and eventually the Holocaust. According toKirk, mass murder became possible only after all attempts at a ‘territorial solution’(190) had failed. For Steinweis, the ‘Final Solution’ was a by-product of the war, whichtransformed the ‘Jewish Question’ from a ‘domestic concern to question of colonialpopulation policy’ (298). Similarly, Doris Bergen, in Caplan’s volume, contends thatthe old intentionalist–functionalist divide elides the reality that genocide was at least asmuch a consequence as a cause of nazi imperialism. According to both Tooze andBergen, the vicious treatment of Jews, Poles, and other ethnic minorities must beviewed as a function of an imperialist racial war fought under brutal circumstances.

Of all the authors under review, Wehler insists most explicitly on the ideologi-cally driven, top-down, ‘intentionalist’ nature of nazi Jewish policy, fed by a rela-tively pervasive – if not necessarily ‘eliminationist’ – popular antisemitism. Evans’sprotagonists are hardly faceless technocrats either. And pace moderate functional-ists like Browning and Kershaw, ethnic cleansing for Evans was less the result ofcumulative radicalization, catalyzed by competing institutions, than a natural con-sequence of Hitler and Himmler’s eliminationist preoccupations. Nevertheless, incontrast to the almost exclusive focus on racial antisemitism common to the 1990s,virtually all the works under review see the Holocaust as the by-product of a largerethno-territorial vision of Empire, in which any threats to social, political, or eco-nomic ‘security’ had to be eliminated.22

Having repeatedly called attention to the role of ‘national community’ in the earlypolitical and military successes of the regime, most of the volumes return to the ideaof Volksgemeinschaft in gauging whether and when the regime’s popularity brokedown during the later phases of the war. All the authors are careful to acknowledgethe escalating threat of violence and arbitrary persecution that defined the ThirdReich, especially after the outbreak of war. But the contributions vary on the preciseinterplay of coercion and consent. Wehler, for example, is keen to emphasize therelative enthusiasm of the general population until nearly the end of the war, includ-ing many Germans’ shock and anger at Stauffenberg and his associates’ attempt toassassinate Hitler. Schlemmer likewise notes the remarkable morale and effectivenessof the Wehrmacht during the first four years of the war, undermined only by over-whelming odds and increasing subordination to the capricious whims of the Fuhrer.Roderick Stackelberg, who deals with the war in considerable detail, and Tim Kirk,who does not, both agree that the Third Reich had a chance to overcome its disad-vantages in men and materiel until as late as mid-1943, when a combination of Alliedair superiority, improvements in Allied anti-submarine technology, and the failure toachieve victory at the Battle of Kursk doomed Germany to defeat.

Less concerned with military operations or tactics than politics and strategy,Evans tends to focus on Hitler’s decision-making, which he finds increasingly disas-trous in the wake of Operation Barbarossa; the Third Reich was probably headed fordefeat even before Stalingrad (November 1942) and certainly had no prospects of

22 See again Bloxham, The Final Solution, op. cit.; Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, op. cit.; Lower, NaziEmpire-Building, op. cit.

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success thereafter. Evans is also less convinced regarding the loyalty of the Germanpopulation, noting the erosion in morale in the wake of Allied advances during thesummer of 1944. Yet Evans finds relatively little coherent opposition, most of whichquickly dissipated after the failure of the 20 July conspiracy.

Instead of focusing on isolated cases of open resistance (Widerstand), writes AlfonsKenkmann in the Suss collection, the most revealing contemporary scholarship onnon-conformity analyzes the everyday ‘options for action in concrete situations’.23

Rather than draw binary distinctions between resistance and collaboration,Kenkmann concludes, we should ‘approach perpetrators no longer exclusively asperpetrators and. . . victims no longer only as victims’ (158–9). Kirk makes muchthe same point in noting the complexity of German responses to the Third Reichand the waxing and waning of resistance activities in direct relation to the ThirdReich’s (military) successes or failures. Pohl draws parallel conclusions about theeffectiveness of anti-German activities outside the Reich proper, with the Polishand French Resistance gaining confidence (and effectiveness) only after Stalingrad.In terms of the home front, both Bergen and Stephenson observe that the ideal ofVolksgemeinschaft gradually disintegrated along with the destruction of Germany’scities, yielding a fragmented, atomized society, both literally and figuratively, by 1945.

Perhaps the most novel aspect of these volumes is the integration of recent scholar-ship on postwar lessons, legacies, and memory.24 The Reichel collection, for

23 See Eric Kurlander, Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich, 1933–1945 (NewHaven, CT and London 2009); Kevin P. Spicer, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy inHitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, IL 2004); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in NaziGermany (Oxford 2001); Mark Roseman, A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany(New York 2002); Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in theThird Reich (Cambridge 2007); Frank Bajohr, ‘‘Unser Hotel ist Judenfrei’’: Bader-Antisemitismus im 19.Und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main 2003); Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolztfus (eds), SocialOutsiders in the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ 2001); Joachim Scholtyseck, Robert Bosch und der liberaleWiderstand gegen Hitler 1933 bis 1945 (Munchen 1999); Cynthia Crane, Divided Lives: The UntoldStories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany (New York 2000); Elizabeth Heineman, WhatDifference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany(Berkeley, CA 1999); Michael Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the ThirdReich (Oxford 1997); Detlev Peukert, Inside the Third Reich: Conformity, Opposition and Racism inEveryday Life (New Haven, CT 1987).24 See for example Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany(New York 1996); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA1997); Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Oxford 1999); Klaus Neumann,Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 2000); Siobhan Kattago,Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport, CT 2001); Robert G.Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley,CA 2001); Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories(Princeton, NJ 2002); Alfred Loesdau (ed.), Erinnerungskultur in unserer Zeit: Zur Verantwortung desHistorikers (Berlin 2005); Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits ofWriting History (Chapel Hill, NC 2006); A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past(Cambridge 2007); Olga Kurilo, Tater, Opfer, Helden: Der Zweite Weltkrieg in der weissrussischenund deutschen Erinnerung (Berlin 2008); Neil Gregor, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past(New Haven, CT 2008); Caroline Schaumann, Memory Matters: Generational Responses toGermany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (Berlin 2008); and Paul B. Jaskot and Gavriel D.Rosenfeld (eds), Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor, MI 2008).




example, traces the formation of a postwar consensus, critical of twentieth-centuryGerman history, in the wake of an initially indifferent, even apologetic attitudetoward the Third Reich. Beginning with the immediate postwar period, Reichel,Constantin Goscher, and Angela Borgstedt discuss, respectively, the juridical pro-ceedings against war criminals, the history of reparations, and the incomplete pro-cess of denazification, which produced, in Borgstedt’s words, a ‘compromisedsociety’ (85) that sublimated the reality of what it had committed. ClaudiaFrohlich addresses the transformation of West German political culture from the1950s through the 1980s, paying close attention to important turning points infashioning a new consensus, from the revolutions of 1968 to the Holocaust televi-sion series (1979) and the mid-1980s ‘Historians’ Controversy’ (Historikerstreit).Peter Steinbach’s detailed essay covering public debates over the nazi dictatorship,Harald Schmid’s discussion of ‘political memorials’, and Christopher Cornelißen’sanalysis of polarizing debates within the historical profession complement Frohlichin showing the evolution of a more critical and self-conscious nationalconsciousness.

Turning from politics to culture, Irmela von der Luhe remarks on the unreflec-tive way that much postwar literature incorporated elements of anti-fascism andphilosemitism, while Norbert Otto Eke, Sven Kramer, and Knut Hickethier dealwith theatre, film, and television respectively. Ulrich Krempel turns to art, CorneliaBrinks to photography, and Winfried Nerdinger to the legacy of nazi architecture,before Stefanie Endlich provides a comprehensive look at the ways in which mon-uments have changed from the early Cold War to the new Germany. Althoughuneven and repetitive in places, these essays offer a holistic picture of the transi-tions in political culture over the last 65 years, with the 1960s representing thecrucial turning point. If the early Federal Republic was defined by a culture ofdenial, the 1960s saw the emergence of a more critical series of attempts to ‘masterthe past’. In a post-reunification Republic, the volume suggests, Germans continueto pursue this critical reappraisal, while nonetheless making room for the under-lying conviction that they too were victims. The editors conclude by asking whetherthis represents the end of a nationally specific set of wartime myths, which is beingreplaced by a ‘European culture of memory’ (395) that deals in more nuancedfashion with the collective European experience of the Third Reich, the secondworld war, and its consequences. Of course, none of these conclusions will besurprising to specialists, nor Germans weaned on public debates regarding theFederal Republic’s intervention in Kosovo (1998), Jorg Friedrich’s pictorial ofAllied fire-bombing (2002), or the controversy surrounding outward displays ofGerman patriotism during the 2006 World Cup.25

In an illuminating final chapter to Caplan’s volume, Robert Moeller marshalshis extensive knowledge of postwar German memory to complicate the chronologyoutlined above. Certainly many Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain

25 See Jorg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg (Munchen 2002); Eric Kurlander,‘Belated Normalization or New Revisionism?’, H-Net 2006 (http://www.h-net.org/�german/reviews/kurlander2oct06.htm).

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sublimated important aspects of the Third Reich after 1945. But Moeller arguesconvincingly that Germans were hardly silent. Many confidently claimed victimstatus, citing their undeniably brutal experience during the last years of the war,from the devastating Allied bombing campaigns, deaths of five million Germansoldiers, and widespread lack of food or shelter, to the mass displacement, rape,and murder of millions more in the wake of the Russian occupation. Losses thatwere ‘registered not in death rates, destruction, and divorce’, Moeller adds,occurred in ‘redrawn borders’ and ‘dramatically altered political constellations’(252). Throughout the 1950s, then, East and West Germans worked to representthemselves as victims, a narrative that was largely incompatible with a self-criticalreflection on what many ordinary Germans had done during the Third Reich.Moeller does observe a return of the repressed of sorts in the 1990s, but thesenarratives of victimization are now subordinate to a wider acknowledgement ofthe immensity of German crimes, something that was generally not the case in the1950s.

In an impressive survey of postwar memory and identity politics, including dis-tinct subsections devoted to the 1980s ‘historians’ controversy’ and 1990s‘Goldhagen debate’, Stackelberg concludes that the ‘culture of national contritionis even stronger in a united Germany than it was before the end of the division ofGermany’ (309). Evans agrees that for all their ‘superficiality’, the postwar trialsand denazification proceedings were ‘a success. . . the open expression of nazi opin-ions became a taboo’ (749). In surveying numerous postwar memoirs, Evans doesobserve the difficulty many Germans had in accepting responsibility for the crimesof the Third Reich and overcoming the feeling that they themselves were victims.Nevertheless, following David Schoenbaum and Ralf Dahrendorf, Evans con-cludes that nazism destroyed the last social and political vestiges of both Prusso-aristocratic privilege and militant left-wing Marxism. Meanwhile, the violence anddestruction of the second world war erased once and for all the German bourgeoi-sie’s ideological proclivity toward fanatical nationalism and imperialism. In short,the German experience of the Third Reich paved the way for the success of theFederal Republic.26

The ‘postwar’ contributions to the Suss volume are a bit less sanguine.Instead of relativizing nazi crimes, writes Christoph Classen, the populariza-tion, internationalization, and commercialization of the Third Reich threatensto dislodge them from their historical context, turning National Socialism intoan ‘interchangeable metaphor for everything evil’ (328). In their co-authoredcontribution to the same volume Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel argue thatinternational responses to the Third Reich and the Holocaust have followeda comparable trajectory to those of the Federal Republic. International interestin the Nuremberg and denazification trials, as well as encouragement of

26 See for example David Schoenbaum,Hitler’s Social Revolution (New York 1997); Ralf Dahrendorf,Society and Democracy in Germany (New York 1967).




subsequent reparations payments by the Federal Republic waned in the 1950s.Yet the Eichmann Trial, the 1960s youth movement, and subsequent wars inthe Middle East produced a wave of ‘Erinnerungskultur’ (memory culture) inthe 1970s and 1980s, with only slight variations among European countries(the Netherlands and Lithuania somewhat earlier; Poland and Great Britainsomewhat later). The end of the Cold War, write Eckel and Moisel, saw arenewed international interest in the Holocaust, leading ultimately to a ‘cos-mopolitanization’ or ‘transnationalization’ of nazi crimes, ‘in which theHolocaust is removed from the concrete historical course and actual locationof events’ and made into an international ‘reference’ point (351). Like Classen,Eckel and Moisel are clearly ambivalent about this growing internationaliza-tion, not to mention anachronistic reification and political instrumentalization,of the Holocaust.

Indeed, all seven volumes suggest that twenty-first-century interpretations ofthe Third Reich are going to be defined increasingly by post-9/11 concerns:namely, the interplay of ethno-religious inclusion and exclusion, terrorism andsecurity, and rivalry among global empires or, as Samuel Huntington has putit, ‘the clash of civilizations’.27 Whether this renewed scholarly emphasis onviolence, Volksgemeinschaft, and empire might prove instructive to a generationimmersed in the ‘War on Terror’ remains open to question. As Reichel,Schmid, and Steinbach recount in their concluding chapter, the emotionallywrought German reception of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1994 waspunctuated by the first revelations of the Rwandan genocide. The publicresponse was discouraging: ‘Never Again Auschwitz? The lack of correlationbetween these parallel events – the historical Auschwitz on the collective screenand the actual genocide in Africa – reflects the inadequacy of trusting thedepth and extent of political-moral edification’ (415). More recently, A. DirkMoses has observed:

The palpable panic in some of the writing about the Holocaust, genocide and

Islamism today indicates more than the haunting presence of Holocaust memory.

The presence of genocidal anxieties and conspiracy theories. . . suggests a general

global phenomenon that is mutually reinforcing and escalating; each ‘‘side’’, whether

Jewish, Christian, or Islamist considering itself a victim of the other.28

Thus, despite the rich and nuanced interpretations outlined in the books underreview, the popular conception of the Third Reich continues to occupy a spaceoutside history, as Classen, Eckel, and Moisel argue above, disintegrated from the

27 See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York1998). On ethno-religious tensions within states, the United States in particular, see Huntington, WhoAre We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York 2005).28 See A. Dirk Moses, ‘Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide Studies, Holocaust Historiography andthe ‘‘Apocalyptic Conjuncture’’’, The Historical Journal, 54, 2 (July 2011), 553–83.

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context of unprecedented imperial rivalry, ethno-national tension, and devastatingworld war that created it.

But it is precisely because analogies to the Third Reich and the Holocaust con-tinue to pervade our contemporary political and intellectual discourse that thesenew works deserve as wide an audience as possible. As Reichel and Schmid note intheir final remarks on our seeming failure to learn from Auschwitz, ‘Es ist gesche-hen, es kann immer wieder geschehen’ (415): It has occurred, it can always occuragain. All the works under review, both implicitly and explicitly, urge their twenty-first century audience not to employ the Holocaust as a universal signifier withwhich to justify their own victimhood or military aggression. They likewise remindus of the dangers of wielding irrational fears of an ethno-religious other or animaginary ‘security threat’ as a tool with which to rationalize our own imperialpretensions. Rather, if we want to understand the recurrence of terrorist violence,ethno-religious tension, and ‘clashing civilizations’ in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we need to pay closer attention, as these excellent syntheses attemptto do, to the context in which similar patterns occurred, in Central Europe andelsewhere, nearly a century ago.

Biographical Note

Eric Kurlander (PhD Harvard University) is Associate Professor and Chair ofModern European History at Stetson University. His recent book, Living WithHitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2009), exam-ines the ways in which German liberals negotiated, resisted, and in some waysaccommodated the Third Reich. His first book, The Price of Exclusion:Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933(Berghahn Books, 2006), describes how ethnic nationalist ideology graduallyundermined the liberal parties in late-Imperial and Weimar Germany. His articleshave appeared in Central European History, The Historian, The Bulletin of theGerman Historical Institute, Ethnopolitics, and The European Review of History,as well as a number of edited collections. Kurlander has held research and writingfellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German HistoricalInstitute; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); the KruppFoundation; and Harvard University’s Program for the Study of Germany andEurope. His current projects include a textbook, The West in Question: Continuityand Change (Pearson-Longman), and Nazi Monsters: A Supernatural History of theThird Reich.




Journal of Contemporary History 2011 Kurlander 920 34

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