The Respectable Career of Fritz K.: The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader (Studies in German History)

Hartmut Berghoff; Cornelia Rauh

ISBN 10: 1782385932 / ISBN 13: 9781782385936

Published by Berghahn Books, 2015

About this Item

Hardcover, xv + 360 pages, b&w photos in text, NOT ex-library. Book is clean and bright throughout, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Short corner creases. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This work is a microhistorical biography of Fritz Kiehn, a mid-level Nazi functionary and provincial industrialist in the Württemberg region. The study traces Kiehn's life through two distinct phases: his "making" as an opportunist who aligned his bourgeois values with the Nazi regime, and his "remaking" after 1945. The book meticulously documents his successful post-war career, analyzing how he navigated denazification to re-establish his "respectable" status. It uses this case study to explore broader themes of complicity, elite continuity, and what the authors term "political poly-opportunism" in Germany's transition from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic.

Seller Inventory # 011832

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Respectable Career of Fritz K.: The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader (Studies in German History)
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782385932
• ISBN 13: 9781782385936
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Entrepreneur and Nazi functionary Fritz Kiehn lived through almost 100 years of German history, from the Bismarck era to the late Bonn Republic. A successful manufacturer, Kiehn joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and obtained a number of influential posts after 1933, making him one of the most powerful Nazi functionaries in southern Germany. These posts allowed him ample opportunity to profit from “Aryanizations” and state contracts. After 1945, he restored his reputation, was close to Adenauer's CDU during Germany's economic miracle, and was a respected and honored citizen in Trossingen. Kiehn's biography provides a key to understanding the political upheavals of the twentieth century, especially the workings of the corrupt Nazi system as well as the “coming to terms” with National Socialism in the Federal Republic.

About the Authors

Hartmut Berghoff is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen in Germany. From 2008 to 2015 he was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.. His latest book, together with Ingo Köhler, is Varieties of Family Business. Germany and the United States, Past and Present (Campus/University of Chicago Press, 2020). Recently he co-edited The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I (Berghahn, 2019).

Cornelia Rauh holds the Contemporary History Chair at the University of Hanover. She is the author of Katholisches Milieu und Kleinstadtgesellschaft (Thorbecke, 1991) and Suisse Aluminium for Hitler’s War? The History of Alusuisse from 1918 to 1950 (Beck, 2009), which won the Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte (GUG) prize. She has also published biographies of entrepreneurs and other books on twentieth-century German and French history. Recently she has been researching the Nazi business of the Guelphs, an important family of the German high nobility.