Synopses & Reviews
In the seventy years since the demise of the Third Reich, there has been a significant transformation in the ways in which the modern world understands Nazism. In this brilliant and eye-opening collection, Richard J. Evans, the acclaimed author of the
Third Reich trilogy, offers a critical commentary on that transformation, exploring how major changes in perspective have informed research and writing on the Third Reich in recent years.
Drawing on his most notable writings from the last two decades, Evans reveals the shifting perspectives on Nazism's rise to political power, its economic intricacies, and its subterranean extension into postwar Germany. Evans considers how the Third Reich is increasingly viewed in a broader international context, as part of the age of imperialism; discusses the growing emphasis on the larger economic and cultural circumstances of the era; and emphasizes the development of research into Nazi society, particularly in the understanding of Nazi Germany as a political system based on popular approval and consent. Exploring the complex relationship between memory and history, Evans also points out the places where the growing need to confront the misdeeds of Nazism and expose the complicity of those who participated has led to crude and sweeping condemnation, when instead historians should be making careful distinctions.
Written with Evans' sharp-eyed insight and characteristically compelling style, these essays offer a summation of the collective cultural memory of Nazism in the present, and suggest the degree to which memory must be subjected to the close scrutiny of history.
About the Author
Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. Knighted in 2012 for his services to scholarship, he is the author of many prizewinning and bestselling books, including his acclaimed study of the Third Reich, whose three volumes have been translated into twelve languages.
Table of Contents
I: Republic and Reich
1. Blueprint for Genocide?
2. Imagining Empire
3. The Defeat of 1918
4. Walther Rathenau
5. Berlin in the Twenties
6 Social Outsiders
II: Inside Nazi Germany
7. Coercion and Consent
8 The 'People's Community'
9. Was Hitler Ill?
10. Adolf and Eva
III: The Nazi Economy
11. Economic Recovery
12. The People's Car
13. The Arms of Krupp
14. The Fellow-Traveller
IV: Foreign Policy
15. Hitler's Ally
16. Towards War
17. Nazis and Diplomats
V: Victory and Defeat
18. Fateful Choices
19. Engineers of Victory
20. The Food of War
21. Defeat Out of Victory
22. Decline and Fall
V: The Politics of Genocide
23. Empire, Race and War
24. Was the 'Final Solutiom' Unique?
25. Europe's Killing Fields
VI: Aftermath
26. The Other Horror
27. Urban Utopias
28. Art in Time of War