Donny the Punk
04-24-2006, 07:56 PM
Another something I wrote years ago, this time a book review:
Since the writing of David Schoenbaum’s illuminating study of the experiences of everyday life inside the Third Reich in 1966, myriad debates have been sparked about how to best interpret and assess the history of National Socialist Germany. A significant contribution to the ongoing historiographical discussion is Detlev Peukert’s book Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, the subject of this review. In brief, Peukert’s monograph is a social history of the Third Reich that examines the impact of Nazi social policy on the lives of ordinary Germans and their consequent attitudes towards the regime. Not only are the reactions to daily life examined, but their causes, which varied from one demographic to another, are explored as well, ultimately revealing abundant paradoxes and contradictions within both the state’s apparatuses and the response to National Socialism. In addition to providing a detailed picture of quotidian life in the Nazi racial state, Peukert argues that in a wider context of study, the “fascist phenomenon should be incorporated within a critical history of modernity” (15) by advancing the ‘interim assessment’ of National Socialism in Germany as a “pathology of modernity” (15), dissimilar from the modern industrial states of the rest of the Occident in many ways only in terms of its ethic. A critique of Peukert’s analysis must therefore treat two different but interrelated theses: his broader interpretation of the nature of the Nazi regime and his assessment of everyday life within its confines.
Inside Nazi Germany contrasts sharply with a great deal of other historical literature dealing with the same topic. Its concept of Nazism as a “symptom of the crisis of industrial class society in inter-war Germany” (11) is a rejection of the schools of thought that regard any of the theories of either a ‘special path of German development’ (Deutscher Sonderweg), the primacy of politics, of economics, the role of monopoly capital or the existence of mass-based support as adequate explanations for European fascism (252-59). The bases of this repudiation are the numerous contradictions and uncertainties pointed to by the examination of all the evidence surrounding the Third Reich, which no cohesive theory can fully explain without at some point undermining its own arguments (14). Furthermore, Peukert’s multifaceted treatment of German attitudes differs from the widely held belief that the traditionally accepted “seduction” and “supervision” theories can satisfactorily account for the willingness of most people to tolerate the most egregious actions of the National Socialist government (67-8). It also eschews the simplistic view of Nazi Germany as a perfectly regimented monolithic entity whose supposed uniformity can explain frequent instances of popular support for the regime’s policies (81). As such, Peukert’s conceptualization both modified common historical understandings and brought new theoretical approaches to Nazism to the fore (it is now considered standard reading on these subjects).
One way in which Peukert exposes the plentiful contradictions within German society at the time is by juxtaposing the desired aims of the Nazi polity with the tangible results of its designs. To illustrate, despite the NSDAP’s anachronistic party platform, exemplified by agrarian romanticism and an emphasis on a blut und ehre mentality (146), the urbanization of German society only increased in the Third Reich (88). Additionally, while the German soldier was a touted as a mediaeval Teutonic knight by Goebbels’ Propagandaminsterium, he was in reality fused with the modern technology of warfare, a union amply demonstrated by the Blitzkrieg tactics of the Wehrmacht.
Moreover, copious programmes extolling conflicting values permeated the Third Reich. Peukert highlights these by demonstrating that groups such as the HJ and the BDM fomented disharmony with the expectation that children, and girls in particular should defer to authority as a result of youth being liberated by being away from their parents, and for girls, by being freed from the traditional obligations of womanhood (151). Likewise, the atomisation of society that resulted from the Nazi breakup of all traditional social networks, especially those of the working class, undermined the regime’s vaunted ideal of a ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) (241). These contradictions led to discordant impressions of Nazism in the minds of the German people. Terror, by virtue of its selective dispensation, became order. Racism, despite its exclusionary nature, represented unity.
The book’s description of the wide-ranging and varied German attitudes at the time rests upon an evidentiary base that at once focuses on generalised and overarching evaluations of public sentiment and personal accounts of individual experiences. The former is derived from two sources: the first, secret reports on morale and dissident activity that were drafted throughout the Third Reich’s 12-year reign by the Gestapo, SD, Hitler Youth and other governmental organisations; the second, ‘Reports on Germany’ produced by the SOPADE (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands im Exil). The Gestapo and other official secret reports are valuable because they provide accounts of public opinion and action that are untainted by the ubiquitous propagandizing of the Third Reich (52). The SOPADE reports, due to their existence outside the realm of National Socialist influence, serve as a kind of controlled variable and corroborate the authenticity of the Nazis’ own reports when the two are congruent (52). The second type of account is more specific and takes the form of documents of police investigations and court transcripts involving oppositional activities. These accounts are supplemented by memoirs and personal diaries written by contemporaries of the era. Together, the two detail more specific incidences of dissent and speak to the motivations and thought processes of the individuals involved. Their use is quite convincing as a means of conveying a concrete impression of Nazi terror through description and reconstruction, which can be difficult to grasp solely in terms of statistics (21).
Individually, each evidentiary source has its shortcomings; the secret reports offer an insightful overview of the public mood but leave out specific details concerning the activities and social background of the individuals concerned, whereas the inverse is true for the court documents and memoirs (66). Peukert effectively addresses this discrepancy by referring to both types of historical data and forming a unified impression of historical reality by approaching the issue from two directions. This tactic recurs throughout the book, for example, when discussing the response of youth to the Nazi regime. A Gestapo or Hitler Youth report on the overt resistance of the Edelweiß Pirates to the Nazi behavioural ideal is complemented by the diary entries or personal letters of a group member (155-60) to provide the reader with a more accurate and detailed impression of the situation being described.
The argument that Nazism was a pathology of modernity is a historical concept “more metaphorical than definitional” (180), which is based largely on well-established empirical facts about the National Socialist Germany. It seeks to place the Third Reich within the context of greater German social history instead of treating it as an aberration or deviance from all normal societal progression (22). Peukert not only addresses the role of the Weimar crisis in the rise of the NSDAP (42), but also explains how much of Nazi ideology was derived from 19th century sources, especially that which dealt with race and Social Darwinism (222-33). Concurrently, he accedes that the modern German era is in no small part a product of its National Socialist legacy (242), necessitating an interpretation of Nazi Germany that coincides with a broader evaluation of German social history as a whole.
Inside Nazi Germany’s social examination of the Third Reich from the bottom up provides helpful insight into the historiographical nature of the Nazi regime, especially in terms of cause and effect, which cannot be so easily gleaned from largely factual histories such as William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Its description of everyday life also acts a prism through which the greater Nazi state can be understood. For example, a Nazi report detailing reduced levels of reading is linked to book burning and Nazi activities that occupied the time of people who might otherwise be reading. To understand reduced reading, therefore, we must learn about the DAF, job creation, rearmament, the reintroduction of military duty, compulsory participation in rallies and so on (24). Hence, the book is self-contextualizing. This contextualization simultaneously provides a cohesive summative account of the Third Reich (although the book does not claim in any way to be a full social history) and immensely complicates even the most banal occurrences of ordinary life. While not detracting from the strength of the book’s arguments (indeed, this complexity reinforces them), it makes Peukert’s analysis far less accessible to the layman of Nazi history. Additionally, Peukert’s scholarship spends little time on certain aspects of Nazi Germany which might have been better elucidated upon, notably the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Röhm and SA purges of 1934 and the Reichskristallnacht. These omissions, however, do not weaken the book, though their inclusion might have strengthened it.
One comes away from Peukert’s account with an overriding sense that some major step has been made towards the goal of achieving unified theory of interpretation of Nazism (15). Its assessment of everyday life, derived from unbiased and wide-ranging primary sources, offers a compelling and ultimately believable portrait of the intrinsically contradictory and paradoxical state of both the regime and of people’s attitudes and reactions towards it. Peukert’s evaluation of Nazism as a consequence of modernity in Germany at the time is convincing for two reasons: it explains all the contradictions exposed by the evidence of his social account, which were up until that time unsatisfactorily accounted for by traditional methods of study, and it is congruent with the study of German social history in a wider context. Is it the best possible exegesis for National Socialism? While it is logical and consistent and rests on evidence used in a plausible manner, it carries with it disturbing implications about the dangers of modernity and industrial class society when uncoupled with Enlightenment principles of emancipation and humanitarianism. It demonstrates that “the challenge of Nazism shows that the evolution of modernity is not a one-way trip to freedom” (249), an assessment which at the very least will undoubtedly ignite further debate on the topic.
Since the writing of David Schoenbaum’s illuminating study of the experiences of everyday life inside the Third Reich in 1966, myriad debates have been sparked about how to best interpret and assess the history of National Socialist Germany. A significant contribution to the ongoing historiographical discussion is Detlev Peukert’s book Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, the subject of this review. In brief, Peukert’s monograph is a social history of the Third Reich that examines the impact of Nazi social policy on the lives of ordinary Germans and their consequent attitudes towards the regime. Not only are the reactions to daily life examined, but their causes, which varied from one demographic to another, are explored as well, ultimately revealing abundant paradoxes and contradictions within both the state’s apparatuses and the response to National Socialism. In addition to providing a detailed picture of quotidian life in the Nazi racial state, Peukert argues that in a wider context of study, the “fascist phenomenon should be incorporated within a critical history of modernity” (15) by advancing the ‘interim assessment’ of National Socialism in Germany as a “pathology of modernity” (15), dissimilar from the modern industrial states of the rest of the Occident in many ways only in terms of its ethic. A critique of Peukert’s analysis must therefore treat two different but interrelated theses: his broader interpretation of the nature of the Nazi regime and his assessment of everyday life within its confines.
Inside Nazi Germany contrasts sharply with a great deal of other historical literature dealing with the same topic. Its concept of Nazism as a “symptom of the crisis of industrial class society in inter-war Germany” (11) is a rejection of the schools of thought that regard any of the theories of either a ‘special path of German development’ (Deutscher Sonderweg), the primacy of politics, of economics, the role of monopoly capital or the existence of mass-based support as adequate explanations for European fascism (252-59). The bases of this repudiation are the numerous contradictions and uncertainties pointed to by the examination of all the evidence surrounding the Third Reich, which no cohesive theory can fully explain without at some point undermining its own arguments (14). Furthermore, Peukert’s multifaceted treatment of German attitudes differs from the widely held belief that the traditionally accepted “seduction” and “supervision” theories can satisfactorily account for the willingness of most people to tolerate the most egregious actions of the National Socialist government (67-8). It also eschews the simplistic view of Nazi Germany as a perfectly regimented monolithic entity whose supposed uniformity can explain frequent instances of popular support for the regime’s policies (81). As such, Peukert’s conceptualization both modified common historical understandings and brought new theoretical approaches to Nazism to the fore (it is now considered standard reading on these subjects).
One way in which Peukert exposes the plentiful contradictions within German society at the time is by juxtaposing the desired aims of the Nazi polity with the tangible results of its designs. To illustrate, despite the NSDAP’s anachronistic party platform, exemplified by agrarian romanticism and an emphasis on a blut und ehre mentality (146), the urbanization of German society only increased in the Third Reich (88). Additionally, while the German soldier was a touted as a mediaeval Teutonic knight by Goebbels’ Propagandaminsterium, he was in reality fused with the modern technology of warfare, a union amply demonstrated by the Blitzkrieg tactics of the Wehrmacht.
Moreover, copious programmes extolling conflicting values permeated the Third Reich. Peukert highlights these by demonstrating that groups such as the HJ and the BDM fomented disharmony with the expectation that children, and girls in particular should defer to authority as a result of youth being liberated by being away from their parents, and for girls, by being freed from the traditional obligations of womanhood (151). Likewise, the atomisation of society that resulted from the Nazi breakup of all traditional social networks, especially those of the working class, undermined the regime’s vaunted ideal of a ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) (241). These contradictions led to discordant impressions of Nazism in the minds of the German people. Terror, by virtue of its selective dispensation, became order. Racism, despite its exclusionary nature, represented unity.
The book’s description of the wide-ranging and varied German attitudes at the time rests upon an evidentiary base that at once focuses on generalised and overarching evaluations of public sentiment and personal accounts of individual experiences. The former is derived from two sources: the first, secret reports on morale and dissident activity that were drafted throughout the Third Reich’s 12-year reign by the Gestapo, SD, Hitler Youth and other governmental organisations; the second, ‘Reports on Germany’ produced by the SOPADE (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands im Exil). The Gestapo and other official secret reports are valuable because they provide accounts of public opinion and action that are untainted by the ubiquitous propagandizing of the Third Reich (52). The SOPADE reports, due to their existence outside the realm of National Socialist influence, serve as a kind of controlled variable and corroborate the authenticity of the Nazis’ own reports when the two are congruent (52). The second type of account is more specific and takes the form of documents of police investigations and court transcripts involving oppositional activities. These accounts are supplemented by memoirs and personal diaries written by contemporaries of the era. Together, the two detail more specific incidences of dissent and speak to the motivations and thought processes of the individuals involved. Their use is quite convincing as a means of conveying a concrete impression of Nazi terror through description and reconstruction, which can be difficult to grasp solely in terms of statistics (21).
Individually, each evidentiary source has its shortcomings; the secret reports offer an insightful overview of the public mood but leave out specific details concerning the activities and social background of the individuals concerned, whereas the inverse is true for the court documents and memoirs (66). Peukert effectively addresses this discrepancy by referring to both types of historical data and forming a unified impression of historical reality by approaching the issue from two directions. This tactic recurs throughout the book, for example, when discussing the response of youth to the Nazi regime. A Gestapo or Hitler Youth report on the overt resistance of the Edelweiß Pirates to the Nazi behavioural ideal is complemented by the diary entries or personal letters of a group member (155-60) to provide the reader with a more accurate and detailed impression of the situation being described.
The argument that Nazism was a pathology of modernity is a historical concept “more metaphorical than definitional” (180), which is based largely on well-established empirical facts about the National Socialist Germany. It seeks to place the Third Reich within the context of greater German social history instead of treating it as an aberration or deviance from all normal societal progression (22). Peukert not only addresses the role of the Weimar crisis in the rise of the NSDAP (42), but also explains how much of Nazi ideology was derived from 19th century sources, especially that which dealt with race and Social Darwinism (222-33). Concurrently, he accedes that the modern German era is in no small part a product of its National Socialist legacy (242), necessitating an interpretation of Nazi Germany that coincides with a broader evaluation of German social history as a whole.
Inside Nazi Germany’s social examination of the Third Reich from the bottom up provides helpful insight into the historiographical nature of the Nazi regime, especially in terms of cause and effect, which cannot be so easily gleaned from largely factual histories such as William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Its description of everyday life also acts a prism through which the greater Nazi state can be understood. For example, a Nazi report detailing reduced levels of reading is linked to book burning and Nazi activities that occupied the time of people who might otherwise be reading. To understand reduced reading, therefore, we must learn about the DAF, job creation, rearmament, the reintroduction of military duty, compulsory participation in rallies and so on (24). Hence, the book is self-contextualizing. This contextualization simultaneously provides a cohesive summative account of the Third Reich (although the book does not claim in any way to be a full social history) and immensely complicates even the most banal occurrences of ordinary life. While not detracting from the strength of the book’s arguments (indeed, this complexity reinforces them), it makes Peukert’s analysis far less accessible to the layman of Nazi history. Additionally, Peukert’s scholarship spends little time on certain aspects of Nazi Germany which might have been better elucidated upon, notably the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Röhm and SA purges of 1934 and the Reichskristallnacht. These omissions, however, do not weaken the book, though their inclusion might have strengthened it.
One comes away from Peukert’s account with an overriding sense that some major step has been made towards the goal of achieving unified theory of interpretation of Nazism (15). Its assessment of everyday life, derived from unbiased and wide-ranging primary sources, offers a compelling and ultimately believable portrait of the intrinsically contradictory and paradoxical state of both the regime and of people’s attitudes and reactions towards it. Peukert’s evaluation of Nazism as a consequence of modernity in Germany at the time is convincing for two reasons: it explains all the contradictions exposed by the evidence of his social account, which were up until that time unsatisfactorily accounted for by traditional methods of study, and it is congruent with the study of German social history in a wider context. Is it the best possible exegesis for National Socialism? While it is logical and consistent and rests on evidence used in a plausible manner, it carries with it disturbing implications about the dangers of modernity and industrial class society when uncoupled with Enlightenment principles of emancipation and humanitarianism. It demonstrates that “the challenge of Nazism shows that the evolution of modernity is not a one-way trip to freedom” (249), an assessment which at the very least will undoubtedly ignite further debate on the topic.