The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945 - Softcover

Aycoberry, Pierre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565846354 ISBN 13: 9781565846357

Publisher: The New Press, 2000

Synopsis

In this highly praised study hailed by Booklist as “disturbing, brutally honest, and scrupulously fair,” Pierre Ayçoberry, the celebrated author of The Nazi Question,combines extraordinary mastery of German history with original research for an unparalleled account of life under Hitler’s Third Reich.

Ayçoberry uncovers the struggles of individuals and social and professional groups who stood up to the pressures of the Nazi Party and often paid a high price, while he also sheds light on the attempts of others—mainly upper- and middle-class professionals—to salvage or improve their positions by casting their lot with the Fuhrer. In this complex answer to the easy judgments passed by many, Pierre Ayçoberry writes what the Washington Post Book World has called “a subtle book that eschews facile generalizations and sensational accusations, and is full of prudent qualifications and warnings that what was true in one place and one time was not necessarily true twenty miles away or one year later.”

About this title

Review

Germany's legacy of belligerence, through the First and especially the Second World War, forced ordinary German people into a great deal of collective hand wringing and self-examination in the wake of their final defeat in 1945. The ensuing years saw Germans "keen to close this parenthesis and begin rebuilding society," as contemporary-history scholar Pierre Ayçoberry puts it, but they had to reconcile their role in a regime responsible for unprecedented atrocities, in near-full collusion with both industry and the church. Ayçoberry cites a broad range of postwar intellectual and political positions, "denunciations and apologias relating to the Prussian tradition ... alternated with diagnoses of the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, suggestions for the rejuvenation of conservatism and liberalism, and attempts to answer the piercing question, 'Are we Germans different from other peoples?'"

Ayçoberry, the respected author of The Nazi Question, revisits this self-examination with an objective outsider's eye and an exceptional facility with German history. Systematically cataloguing the significant events, individuals, and organizations in Germany from 1933 to 1945, Ayçoberry sorts out the period's difficult questions, shining light on and giving explanation for the many who threw in with the Führer and recounting the penalties paid by those who didn't. Chronologically arranged sections deal with the violence and terror of the SA and SS (including the brutal Death's Heads), examine how the Nazi myth was packaged and sold to the German public, and describe day-to-day reality in fractured wartime Germany. A weighty, academic study by an authority in the field (translated from the original French), Ayçoberry's Social History of the Third Reich is a rigorous, evenhanded chronicle of a complex and chaotic time. --Paul Hughes

About the Author

Pierre Ayçoberry is the author of The Nazi Question and an emeritus professor of contemporary history at the University of Human Sciences in Strasbourg, France.

Edition details

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1565846354
• ISBN 13: 9781565846357
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 392