Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

Hildesheim is a mid-sized provincial town in northwest Germany. OrdinaryGermans in Extraordinary Times is a carefully drawn account of how townspeople wentabout their lives and reacted to events during the Nazi era. Andrew Stuart Bergersonargues that ordinary Germans did in fact make Germany and Europe more fascist, moreracist, and more modern during the 1930s, but they disguised their involvementbehind a pre-existing veil of normalcy.

Bergerson details a wayof being, believing, and behaving by which ordinary Germans imaginedtheir powerlessness and absence of responsibility even as they collaborated in theNazi revolution. He builds his story on research that includes anecdotes of everydaylife collected systematically from newspapers, literature, photography, personaldocuments, public records, and especially extensive interviews with a representativesample of residents born between 1900 and 1930.

The bookconsiders the actual customs and experiences of friendship and neighborliness in aGerman town before, during, and after the Third Reich. By analyzing the customs ofconviviality in interwar Hildesheim, and the culture of normalcy these customsinvoked, Bergerson aims to help us better understand how ordinary Germanstransformed neighbors into Jews orAryans.

The role of ordinary Germans in the success of the Nazi revolution.