New Books in German Studies

Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to the existing literature on interwar German military doctrine. The stunning German victories in 1939 and 1940 have usually been attributed to their practice of “Blitzkrieg” (Lightning War). The inventive...

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exe...

Robert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one quibbles with some of the details of his argument, one is sure to profit from reading his work. When a Citino book appears in print, it automatically goes in my “to read” pile. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (UP of Kansas, 2007), w...

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill.” And it explains victory: “We won th...

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they may well have been fascists, that is, Nazis. Despite t...

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and...

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet on Hitler. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler pres...

In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two remarkably insightful theses. The military industrial complex was born three decades before Eisenhower put a name on it. The first is that the primary result of the disaster that was World War I was not the...

Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might well have said war (or at least that war) was the “continuation of politics by any means.” Hitler was terribly specific about this. The Slavs, he said, were Untermenschen (subhumans). The Communists wer...

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi–the East German secret service–to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall, the Stasi files were opened and my friend requested to see her dossier. I have to say, it was disap...

I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a moment that “we” could lose. “We” were a great country run by good people; “they” were a little country run by bad people. I spent my time building models of American tanks, planes, and ships. I read a l...

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl in her outstanding new book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge UP, 2009). The book is about the trial of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile...

One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cult...

To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German descent, and they surely thought of themselves as refined, industrious, and orderly. The Nazis, however, seemed un-German in important ways: they were, apparently, racist thugs bent on destroying democra...

We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “ordinary” place. In the West but also the East; sovereign but not sovereign; German but not German; poor but rich. I could go on. It was the unnatural product of the Cold War, so when the Cold War ended...

Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and believed none of what it said. True enough, but actually the relationship between the identity “German” and “Nazi” was a bit more complicated than “this” and “that.” The two were mixed, as Peter Fritzsche shows in his fascinating new book Life and Death...

It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “breakthrough” that might bring victory. It was simply one long hard slog to nowhere. Why not just give up? Thanks to Alexander Watson’s insightful Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in th...

Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinelanders. They even had their own small Weingut where they made a nice Riesling. But they were not originally from the Rhinegau at all. They were from East Prussia, a place where there are no longer any Ger...

I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But now I know different thanks to Tony Michels’ terrific Fire in their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). As Tony explains, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants wh...

Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calculated, systematic and horribly efficient as the Nazi murder of the Jews and other “Untermenchen.” One thing, however, is certain: the Holocaust is doubtless the best documented instance of mass murder in...

It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it reminds us of the dangers of ethnic hatred in an era that knows it too well.  But in another way the Nazi = Holocaust equation obscures part of the story of Hitler’s insanity and that of all genocidal m...

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus on the Nazi period. He’s the author of a number of path-breaking books, including The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 (Sage Publications, 1974), The Gestapo and Ge...