Synopsis
‘It couldn’t happen here’, goes the complacent assurance that the horror of the Nazi state will not recur elsewhere, because surely it arose from unique circumstances. Within a long-standing debate over the real origins of Nazi Germany, this book offers a special contribution which integrates marxist theory with first-hand experience.
In the early 1930s Alfred Sohn-Rethel worked as editorial assistant at the Fuhrerbriefe, a current affairs newsletter circulated exclusively among the upper echelons of German big business; meanwhile he passed on information to the anti-Nazi underground, until fleeing to England in 1936. Sohn-Rethel’s book documents that inside information, as well as anecdotes about the lurid personalities of early 1930s Germany. He uses the material to characterize the Nazi state as a capitalist solution to economic crisis. Thus his argument provides a
timely intervention in to current debates among historians.
In her Afterword , Jane Caplan draws out the book’s relevance to controversies about the origins of fascism, both then and now. She emphasizes Sohn-Rethels account of Nazi rule as a means of disciplining labour, and discusses the implications for today’s economic crisis.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel has taught at Bremen University.
Jane Caplan teaches European history at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.
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