Larry Eugene Jones's work has long been invaluable to anyone who toils in the mines of Weimar political history. In this edited volume, he teams up with Hermann Beck to deliver a set of fourteen essays zeroing in on the transition period from 1932 to 1934, rightly insisting that the Nazi seizure of power “was not a single event that happened on 30 January 1933 but a process” (4) that extended from Franz von Papen's chancellorship through the Ernst Röhm purge. The authors explore this process primarily through the lens of parties, politicians, institutions, and elites, citing Karl Dietrich Bracher's emphasis on individual agency and moral responsibility as inspiration.

The volume takes us inside Kurt von Schleicher's doomed attempts to tame the Nazi beast and (with Carl Schmitt) constrain the nascent Nazi dictatorship, the strivings of political Catholicism to maintain institutional independence, SPD nationalists’ and trade unionists’ attempts to counter Nazi inroads with workers, and the Protestant church's accommodationist behavior. Several pieces wade into social history, such as Beck's granular study of street attacks on Ostjuden during the Nazi regime's earliest days and Katharine Kennedy's look at the Nazi revolution in elementary schools. Conservatives and Catholics are most prominent in the volume, whereas liberals are virtually absent (reflecting their marginality in the early 1930s), as are communists. Although three chapters focus on Nazi activities, most discuss other actors’ reactions to Nazism, mainly in the form of attempts to contain it or compromises in the hope of minimizing the damage to themselves. Those actors all found themselves sidelined sooner or later. Although Jones and Beck stress that the Nazi takeover was “neither inevitable nor unavoidable” (2), the Nazis’ ruthlessness and the popularity of their egalitarian promises make it difficult to imagine anything stopping the juggernaut.

It seems unbelievable that there are still things we do not know about this period, but these essays add new details to familiar events. Andre Postert's chapter on the gravitational pull of the Hitler Youth stands out for its portrayal of both genuine enthusiasm and the tactics of Christian youths to stave off Gleichschaltung (in one group's case by disguising themselves with swastikas). Jones uses recently surfaced archival materials to expand the timeline of Schleicher's machinations and ultimate miscalculations. Martin Menke paints a complex portrait of Ludwig Kaas, the conflicted Center Party leader.

Several essays step refreshingly outside Berlin. Winfried Becker's depiction of the Nazi takeover in Bavaria is especially vivid, featuring a quixotic attempt to restore the Wittelsbach monarchy and courageous behavior by the appropriately named Minister President Heinrich Held in the face of Storm Trooper (SA) brutality against officials and journalists. Bruce Campbell's profile of the SA's feverish pace of activity and its psychological toll on the men involved in it is informative, though it would have been interesting to see him engage more with Andrew Wackerfuss's recent claims about same-sex dynamics within the early SA. Some essays will be of interest only to specialists, and others could work well in the classroom, such as the introduction's overview of the historiography or Peter Hayes's chapter on big business, which elegantly summarizes his book on the subject.

With its emphasis on traditional politics, this volume represents a long-dominant way of seeing this period, which may be less prevalent now. This is almost entirely a story of men and misses the opportunity to consider how women in politics—from the upper reaches of the national-conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) or the Center Party to the legions of local activists in the Protestant and Catholic milieus—experienced being hustled off stage. This lack of female voices extends to the authors themselves: it is disheartening to see only one woman included in the volume. Many female historians write on the transition from Weimar to Nazism (Molly Loberg and Laurie Marhoefer spring to mind). Had the editors taken a more expansive view of politics to include areas such as Alltagsgeschichte or the history of sexuality, they could have crafted a more gender-balanced and more nuanced volume.

Still, these detailed, readable essays offer valuable evidence of how particular actors made the Nazi takeover possible, whether through active choice or passive behavior. Although 1933 clearly represented a rupture in German politics, this collection stresses the continuities particularly in Weimar's enemies’ efforts to undermine the republic and in elites’ responses to Hitler. Although Hitler outmaneuvered his conservative enablers, these essays remind us that they were hardly unwitting participants: they were all too happy to destroy their political foes and democracy itself to preserve their own power, only realizing their error when it was too late (here's looking at you, Papen). This volume shows the combination of bad faith, naiveté, and outright moral hollowness that prevailed between 1932 and 1934, offering lessons about Germany's past that remain relevant to our current political moment.