Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1108484980 ISBN 13: 9781108484985

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Was it possible to have a private life under the Nazi dictatorship? It has often been assumed that private life and the notion of privacy had no place under Nazi rule. Meanwhile, in recent years historians of Nazism have been emphasising the degree to which Germans enthusiastically embraced notions of community. This volume sheds fresh light on these issues by focusing on the different ways in which non-Jewish Germans sought to uphold their privacy. It highlights the degree to which the regime permitted or even fostered such aspirations, and it offers some surprising conclusions about how private roles and private self-expression could be served by, and in turn serve, an alignment with the community. Furthermore, contributions on occupied Poland offer insights into the efforts by 'ethnic Germans' to defend their aspirations to privacy and by Jews to salvage the remnants of private life in the ghetto.

About this title

Book Description

It is often assumed that there was no such thing as private life under Nazi rule. This volume challenges that view by showing how non-Jewish Germans asserted their privacy and asking how far the regime encouraged such aspirations. At the same time, it traces how 'ethnic Germans' and Jews in occupied Poland sought to defend their privacy.

About the Author

Elizabeth Harvey is Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. She has published extensively on Weimar and Nazi Germany, particularly on gender history, the history of youth and the history of photography. She is the author of Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (2003) and is currently working on the history of gender and forced labour in occupied Poland.

Johannes Hürter is Head of the Research Department Munich at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich and Adjunct Professor of Modern History at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany. He is a leading expert on the political and military history of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich. His works include Hitlers Heerführer: Die deutschen Oberbefehlshaber im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (2006) and Hitler: New Research (2018), edited with Elizabeth Harvey.

Maiken Umbach is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham. She is co-director of Nottingham's Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies, and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project 'Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism'. She has published extensively on the relationship between subjectivity, identity politics, and ideology in modern European history. Her works include Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept (2018) and Photography, Migration and Identity: A German-Jewish-American Story (2018).

Andreas Wirsching is Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich and Professor of History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen. He has published extensively on European political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of the European Union. His most recent works include Hüter der Ordnung. Die Innenministerien in Bonn und Ost-Berlin nach dem Nationalsozialismus, edited with Frank Bösch (2018).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1108484980
• ISBN 13: 9781108484985
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 410
• Editor: Harvey Elizabeth, Hürter Johannes, Umbach Maiken, Wirsching Andreas