Post by Bozur on Dec 19, 2005 5:20:10 GMT -5
'The Third Reich in Power: 1933-1939,' by Richard J. Evans
A State of Evil
Review by BRIAN LADD
Published: December 18, 2005
HISTORIANS of Nazi Germany know they will be measured against the remarkable success of William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," a 1,200-page doorstop that has been selling briskly for four and a half decades. Shirer's tale of a titanic struggle between good and evil, peppered with sneering characterizations of Nazi bigwigs, has long been the bane of history professors. As a Berlin-based journalist in the 1930's, he watched the crowds cheer Hitler, and came away with a rather sour opinion of Germans in general. He presents Hitler as "but a logical continuation of German history," the culmination of an authoritarian tradition that encompassed Luther, Hegel and Nietzsche, among many others.
Times Wide World
German girls celebrating the 1935 plebiscite that attached the Saarland to Germany. More than 90 percent of the votes favored the German connection.
THE THIRD REICH IN POWER
1933-1939.
By Richard J. Evans.
Illustrated. 941 pp. The Penguin Press. $37.95.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Most scholars have little patience with attempts to explain history through national character. According to Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, the Nazis' use of German symbols and traditions should not distract us from the frighteningly modern character of their regime. Of course it was suited to Germany - it could not have functioned otherwise - but to say this does little to explain its horrors.
Evans wants to set the record straight with a new book, or rather, with three of them. The present volume is the second of a projected trilogy. "The Coming of the Third Reich," published here last year, brought Hitler to power in 1933. "The Third Reich in Power" opens with a marvelously succinct synopsis of those developments, after which Evans takes the story up to the eve of World War II. The third volume will cover the war and genocide.
Heir to a British tradition of dons who write engagingly for a broad public, Evans has done a great service simply in digesting the mountain of recent scholarship on the Nazis for the general reader. Even before this enormous enterprise, he was a prolific author, perhaps best known for his convincing demolition of the tendentious scholarship of the once-respected Third Reich expert David Irving (recently arrested in Austria on a charge of Holocaust denial).
Before the war, Evans explains, Germany underwent a brutal and chilling transformation. Behind a facade of legality, the Nazis dismantled the established protections of law. Not satisfied merely to crush a lively if troubled democracy, they used their police state and the mass media to dissolve traditional allegiances. Replacing most forms of organized social life with new, Nazi-themed activities, they left citizens with no place to share heretical thoughts. The result was a nightmare version of a normal modern society, with popular entertainment manipulating public enthusiasms and hatreds, and the government intruding into intimate matters of the mind and body while demanding an end to the coddling of the weak.
It is surprisingly hard to say just what Nazism was, other than a vague if radical ideology. Hitler, a leader bored by administrative detail, left the way open for endless squabbles among his fanatical and often corrupt subordinates. Nevertheless, Evans skillfully sorts through such matters as the violent relationship between the street brawlers of the paramilitary SA and their more disciplined rivals in Heinrich Himmler's SS; the regime's initiatives to promote maternity, exercise and health (including an antismoking campaign); and its alluring promises of equal opportunity for all Germans. Particularly fraught was the Nazi state's relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and the established Protestant church. Neither was completely Nazified, but many church leaders heartily endorsed the Nazis' anti-Communism and anti-Semitism. Evans restores the complexity of well-known figures like the pastor Martin Niemöller, a once-enthusiastic Nazi whose attempt to preserve the autonomy of the Protestant churches turned him, paradoxically, into an anti-Semitic defender of the Jews.
In places, Evans's evenhandedness can be unsatisfying, or worse. On the disputed question of whether there were uniquely Nazi forms of art, for example, he seems to suggest that we can simply equate Nazi art with bad art, and leave it at that. Consider his uncharacteristically vehement opinion of the composer Carl Orff's cantata "Carmina Burana," which he sees as characteristically Nazi: "its crude tonality, its brutal, repetitious rhythms, its medieval texts and folksy tunes, its numbing, insistent pulse, its absence of anything to engage the mind, seemed to sweep away all the excrescences of modernity and intellectualism that Nazism so detested and take culture back to the supposed primitive simplicities of the distant, peasant past." One does not have to be an Orff fan to see that a great deal of music might qualify as Nazi by this definition.
The story of the German people - Evans's real subject - does not lend itself to drama as easily as the story of Hitler and his henchmen, especially when hundreds of dry scholarly tomes stand between the historian and his cast of characters. He enlivens his narrative by drawing on diaries like that of Luise Solmitz of Hamburg, whose enthusiasm for the new order was dampened by the growing discrimination her family faced because her husband was, by official definition, a Jew. Along with other wavering Nazis, she remained faithful to the cause by assuring herself all would be well if only Hitler knew of the abuses perpetrated in his name.
In contrast to many other writers, Evans does not pretend that these vignettes can unlock the secrets of the Third Reich. But when he turns to the larger areas of politics, economics and ideology, his book becomes more demanding. In order to understand the lives of people grappling with forces beyond their control, we are asked to comprehend what they could not.
Evans is better at sustaining a dramatic narrative in the last sections, which return to the most familiar events of the period. First comes the growing persecution of Germany's Jews, culminating in orchestrated nationwide violence on the "night of broken glass" in 1938. Evans vividly portrays the exhilaration of hard-core Nazis at this event, as well as the shock felt by many bystanders, who could not imagine that much worse was soon to come. He places Nazi anti-Semitism in the context of the Reich's broader ambitions for racial purity, which justified the persecution of homosexuals, the disabled and Gypsies, among others. But he argues that no twisted logic of pseudoscientific eugenics can explain the Nazis' obsession with the Jews.
The final chapter turns to the unfolding plans for war, as the Nazis dismantled what was left of the World War I peace settlement, and Europe proved unable to unite against them. Here Hitler comes to center stage, bullying his sometimes reluctant generals, berating and deceiving foreign leaders, and pushing aside his more seasoned diplomats in favor of the suave but fanatical Joachim von Ribbentrop.
For most of the book, however, the Leader (Evans prefers to translate and thus demystify German words like "Führer") remains in the background, which is precisely where he lurked in the minds and lives of most Germans. Evans avoids the weakness of too many histories of the Third Reich, which become virtual biographies of Hitler, with ordinary Germans appearing either as victims of Himmler's terror or as mindless vessels of Goebbels's propaganda. Instead, he presents a story with few heroes and too many colorless villains - a fuller and truer picture of the Third Reich, but a less gripping one than Shirer's.
Brian Ladd is the author of "The Ghosts of Berlin" and "The Companion Guide to Berlin."
A State of Evil
Review by BRIAN LADD
Published: December 18, 2005
HISTORIANS of Nazi Germany know they will be measured against the remarkable success of William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," a 1,200-page doorstop that has been selling briskly for four and a half decades. Shirer's tale of a titanic struggle between good and evil, peppered with sneering characterizations of Nazi bigwigs, has long been the bane of history professors. As a Berlin-based journalist in the 1930's, he watched the crowds cheer Hitler, and came away with a rather sour opinion of Germans in general. He presents Hitler as "but a logical continuation of German history," the culmination of an authoritarian tradition that encompassed Luther, Hegel and Nietzsche, among many others.
Times Wide World
German girls celebrating the 1935 plebiscite that attached the Saarland to Germany. More than 90 percent of the votes favored the German connection.
THE THIRD REICH IN POWER
1933-1939.
By Richard J. Evans.
Illustrated. 941 pp. The Penguin Press. $37.95.
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Most scholars have little patience with attempts to explain history through national character. According to Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, the Nazis' use of German symbols and traditions should not distract us from the frighteningly modern character of their regime. Of course it was suited to Germany - it could not have functioned otherwise - but to say this does little to explain its horrors.
Evans wants to set the record straight with a new book, or rather, with three of them. The present volume is the second of a projected trilogy. "The Coming of the Third Reich," published here last year, brought Hitler to power in 1933. "The Third Reich in Power" opens with a marvelously succinct synopsis of those developments, after which Evans takes the story up to the eve of World War II. The third volume will cover the war and genocide.
Heir to a British tradition of dons who write engagingly for a broad public, Evans has done a great service simply in digesting the mountain of recent scholarship on the Nazis for the general reader. Even before this enormous enterprise, he was a prolific author, perhaps best known for his convincing demolition of the tendentious scholarship of the once-respected Third Reich expert David Irving (recently arrested in Austria on a charge of Holocaust denial).
Before the war, Evans explains, Germany underwent a brutal and chilling transformation. Behind a facade of legality, the Nazis dismantled the established protections of law. Not satisfied merely to crush a lively if troubled democracy, they used their police state and the mass media to dissolve traditional allegiances. Replacing most forms of organized social life with new, Nazi-themed activities, they left citizens with no place to share heretical thoughts. The result was a nightmare version of a normal modern society, with popular entertainment manipulating public enthusiasms and hatreds, and the government intruding into intimate matters of the mind and body while demanding an end to the coddling of the weak.
It is surprisingly hard to say just what Nazism was, other than a vague if radical ideology. Hitler, a leader bored by administrative detail, left the way open for endless squabbles among his fanatical and often corrupt subordinates. Nevertheless, Evans skillfully sorts through such matters as the violent relationship between the street brawlers of the paramilitary SA and their more disciplined rivals in Heinrich Himmler's SS; the regime's initiatives to promote maternity, exercise and health (including an antismoking campaign); and its alluring promises of equal opportunity for all Germans. Particularly fraught was the Nazi state's relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and the established Protestant church. Neither was completely Nazified, but many church leaders heartily endorsed the Nazis' anti-Communism and anti-Semitism. Evans restores the complexity of well-known figures like the pastor Martin Niemöller, a once-enthusiastic Nazi whose attempt to preserve the autonomy of the Protestant churches turned him, paradoxically, into an anti-Semitic defender of the Jews.
In places, Evans's evenhandedness can be unsatisfying, or worse. On the disputed question of whether there were uniquely Nazi forms of art, for example, he seems to suggest that we can simply equate Nazi art with bad art, and leave it at that. Consider his uncharacteristically vehement opinion of the composer Carl Orff's cantata "Carmina Burana," which he sees as characteristically Nazi: "its crude tonality, its brutal, repetitious rhythms, its medieval texts and folksy tunes, its numbing, insistent pulse, its absence of anything to engage the mind, seemed to sweep away all the excrescences of modernity and intellectualism that Nazism so detested and take culture back to the supposed primitive simplicities of the distant, peasant past." One does not have to be an Orff fan to see that a great deal of music might qualify as Nazi by this definition.
The story of the German people - Evans's real subject - does not lend itself to drama as easily as the story of Hitler and his henchmen, especially when hundreds of dry scholarly tomes stand between the historian and his cast of characters. He enlivens his narrative by drawing on diaries like that of Luise Solmitz of Hamburg, whose enthusiasm for the new order was dampened by the growing discrimination her family faced because her husband was, by official definition, a Jew. Along with other wavering Nazis, she remained faithful to the cause by assuring herself all would be well if only Hitler knew of the abuses perpetrated in his name.
In contrast to many other writers, Evans does not pretend that these vignettes can unlock the secrets of the Third Reich. But when he turns to the larger areas of politics, economics and ideology, his book becomes more demanding. In order to understand the lives of people grappling with forces beyond their control, we are asked to comprehend what they could not.
Evans is better at sustaining a dramatic narrative in the last sections, which return to the most familiar events of the period. First comes the growing persecution of Germany's Jews, culminating in orchestrated nationwide violence on the "night of broken glass" in 1938. Evans vividly portrays the exhilaration of hard-core Nazis at this event, as well as the shock felt by many bystanders, who could not imagine that much worse was soon to come. He places Nazi anti-Semitism in the context of the Reich's broader ambitions for racial purity, which justified the persecution of homosexuals, the disabled and Gypsies, among others. But he argues that no twisted logic of pseudoscientific eugenics can explain the Nazis' obsession with the Jews.
The final chapter turns to the unfolding plans for war, as the Nazis dismantled what was left of the World War I peace settlement, and Europe proved unable to unite against them. Here Hitler comes to center stage, bullying his sometimes reluctant generals, berating and deceiving foreign leaders, and pushing aside his more seasoned diplomats in favor of the suave but fanatical Joachim von Ribbentrop.
For most of the book, however, the Leader (Evans prefers to translate and thus demystify German words like "Führer") remains in the background, which is precisely where he lurked in the minds and lives of most Germans. Evans avoids the weakness of too many histories of the Third Reich, which become virtual biographies of Hitler, with ordinary Germans appearing either as victims of Himmler's terror or as mindless vessels of Goebbels's propaganda. Instead, he presents a story with few heroes and too many colorless villains - a fuller and truer picture of the Third Reich, but a less gripping one than Shirer's.
Brian Ladd is the author of "The Ghosts of Berlin" and "The Companion Guide to Berlin."