Overview
Hitler's Germany provides a comprehensive narrative history of Nazi Germany and sets it in the wider context of nineteenth and twentieth century German history. Roderick Stackelberg analyzes how it was possible that a national culture of such creativity and achievement could generate such barbarism and destructiveness.
This second edition has been updated throughout to incorporate recent historical research and engage with current debates in the field. It includes:
- an expanded introduction focusing on the hazards of writing about Nazi Germany
- an extended analysis of fascism, totalitarianism, imperialism and ideology
- a broadened contextualisation of antisemitism
- discussion of the Holocaust including the euthanasia program and the role of eugenics
- new chapters on Nazi social and economic policies and the structure of government as well as on the role of culture, the arts, education and religion
- additional maps, tables and a chronology
- a fully updated bibliography.
Exploring the controversies surrounding Nazism and its afterlife in historiography and historical memory Hitler’s Germany provides students with an interpretive framework for understanding this extraordinary episode in German and European history.
Synopsis
Hitler's Germany provides a comprehensive narrative history of Nazi Germany and sets it in the wider context of nineteenth and twentieth century German history. Roderick Stackelberg analyzes how it was possible that a national culture of such creativity and achievement could generate such barbarism and destructiveness.
This second edition has been updated throughout to incorporate recent historical research and engage with current debates in the field. It includes:
- an expanded introduction focusing on the hazards of writing about Nazi Germany
- an extended analysis of fascism, totalitarianism, imperialism and ideology
- a broadened contextualisation of antisemitism
- discussion of the Holocaust including the euthanasia program and the role of eugenics
- new chapters on Nazi social and economic policies and the structure of government as well as on the role of culture, the arts, education and religion
- additional maps, tables and a chronology
- a fully updated bibliography.
Exploring the controversies surrounding Nazism and its afterlife in historiography and historical memory Hitler’s Germany provides students with an interpretive framework for understanding this extraordinary episode in German and European history.
Publishers Weekly
Extending from Hitler's 1923 abortive "Beer Hall Putsch" to WWII and its aftermath, Stackelberg's engrossing narrative history deserves a wide readership. A humanities professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., Stackelberg cogently argues that Nazi rule was generally maintained by popular consensus rather than by coercion (he's thus in agreement with Daniel Goldhagen, whose 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, he pointedly praises). Wide sectors of the German public, he notes, were all too ready to collaborate with the Nazi regime, either out of conviction or expediency. Balancing "intentionalist" versus "functionalist" explanations of the Holocaust, Stackelberg maintains that the Nazis' commitment, from the very start, to total exclusion of Jews from German society, combined with Nazi adherence to the deadly eugenic principle of exterminating whoever they deemed "life unworthy of life," led to the genocide of two-thirds of European Jewry under the facilitating conditions created by the war. Combining dispassionate analysis with dramatic writing, he provides historical context for Third Reich barbarism by boldly delineating a "pre-history" of Nazism that includes Bismarck's absolutist rule, the work of late-19th-century nationalist propagandists and the Free Corps goon squads who crushed the 1919 Spartacist revolt and murdered Rosa Luxemburg (Free Corps veterans were later recruited to be leaders of Hitler's own storm troops, the SA). Stackelberg ably covers the Nuremberg trials, German denazification and the contemporary resurgence of militant neo-Nazi fringe groups. While he offers no surprises or new findings, Stackelberg gives readers a superb historical synthesis. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.