leave it to the professionals

books:


	• The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation Ian Kershaw A Hodder Arnold Publication, 1993 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Not for casual reading

This book is a collection of short and dense summaries of other prominent works written on Nazism. Thoroughly researched and contanining a wealth of information, Kershaw's work is a valuable introduction for any researcher or college student. However, I think the esoteric rhetoric and scholarly details makes it kind of hard to digest for the casual reader not familiar with German history.

This is NOT for beginners.

I first read Kershaw's Adolf Hitler: Hubris and Nemesis. I couldn't put it down. I then picked up Kershaw's The Hitler Myth. Also an excellent read. I then moved on to The Nazi Dictatorship and within the first 5 minutes I realized I was in over my head. I am a 38 year old lifelong student of WWII. I have been reading about WWII since I was a kid. And I have a Masters degree. Yet this book was way over my head. This book is a HEAVY read and in my opinion is probably meant for history scholars, not amateurs like me. I'm giving it 5 stars based on the aforementioned works by Kershaw and the assumption that this book is of the same quality. But I didn't read it.

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The best in historiagraphy

This book does an excellent job of outlining the current historiography of the Nazi regime. It is really only meant for scholars and it is fairly dense even for them. Kershaw does a masterful job of capturing each of the debates and this is really a great book if you want to write about Nazi Germany but don't know what to focus on. It is still relevant even today and does a great job of outlining the current debates that need to be addressed by historians.

leave it to the professionals

If you have read more than a few books about the history of our world from 1930 to 1945 you may begin to have questions about the National Socialist Movement and the course and effects of its government of Germany. These are questions like:
- Was the National Socialist movement in Germany a unique event or was it a part of a larger historical process in the terrible 20th century?
- What was the relationship between the Nazi led government and the governance of the German economy?
- Was Hitler the author of all that happened in the Third Riech or was he an enabler of many things that were potentially present in Germany?
- What, exactly, was Hitler's role in the destruction of the European Jews?
- Was German(read Nazi?) foreign policy driven by a master plan for world conquest (or domination?) or improvised and opportunistic?
- Was the Third Reich a socially liberating event to the lower middle class or was it a reaffirmation of traditional hierarchy and power structure in another guise?
- What did German resistance to the National Socialist movement and government actually amount to?
- How is it possible to consider National Socialist genocide as part of a normal historical account?
- How is is possible to do objective and empathetic history in the face of the moral values of the Nazi movement and government?

If you find these questions significant and interesting, there is no better single book to read. Each of these questions is covered by Mr Kershaw more or less in two phases. First there is review of the schools of interpretation promulgated by various historians, most of them professional, and then the author makes his own judgement and evaluation of the contentions at hand. Of particular interest to me is the very thorough coverage of the views and controversies among German historians of the last sixty years as these are rarely reported in the US media. Mr Kershaw does not completely ignore the work of popular historians but it is clear that all the points of view they may have are in fact covered by the range of views among the academic community. The author's personal insights and judgements seem well considered and generally appropriate to me.

I think the only area these professional historians have trouble with is the area of the emotional and psychological appeal of the National Socialist movement to so many Germans. I think to really confront that confronts all of us to acknowledge that there may be a darker side within us that could be touched by the myth structure of racial homogeneity and purfication. Consideration of that question of good and evil is just
beyond the job description of a professional historian and belongs to the philosopher or theologian.

Of particular value, and only to be expected, is the extensive bibliography and the sometimes illuminating foot notes. The concerns of some reviewers about the dense terminology should be noted. Part of that seems to be the result of translating terms from German that come out as rather involved hyphenated words in English. On the other hand the issue is that some of the problems studied here are complex and the answers are not simple and ways of talking about them strech our vocabulary. Ultimately my view is that real knowledge and understanding sometimes involves hard work and digging through this text is work. So be ready to do that or don't bother.

If you have read a number of popular histories of the Nazi period, I recommend this book and The Art of the Third Reich (seperately reviewed) to grasp the tangible and intangible aspects of the terrible and instructive time.

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Kershaw

Kershaw is God. This book is the bible for any scholar of the Third Reich.

reviews: page 1, 2

This introduction to Hitler's Germany is an incisive exploration of the major themes and debates relating to Nazism.

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