Pamela Swett and Jonathan Wiesen have written what is likely to become the new standard single volume synthesis of Nazi Germany. The book testifies both their prominence in the field and the potential for coauthoring at its best. The prose is smooth and authoritative, delivered in a singular voice and with an commendable economy of language. The book most explicitly draws on scholarship concerned with the relative balance of consent and coercion. The authors distill this work to narrate a brutal but popular dictatorship and “a dynamic society based on exclusionary and inclusionary practices,” where “people could both fear the regime and enjoy lives that demanded a certain social and political conformity.” (2) But more broadly, Swett and Wiesen showcase their command of the field, integrating social, cultural, economic, political, and military history from the rise of the movement to the destruction of the regime. The result is a book that is both highly readable and highly teachable.
Nazi Germany spans twelve chapters balancing a chronological and thematic approach that might be thought of in three rough blocs. The first two chapters move the reader from the imperial period to Hitler's appointment as chancellor. The next six focus on the prewar years of Nazi rule with thematic analyses of the consolidation of the dictatorship; racism and biopolitics; the economy and society; culture and the arts; youth, gender, and sexuality; and foreign relations and global engagement. The last four turn to the war years, respectively zeroing in on conquest and empire to 1942; the Holocaust; resistance and rescue; and the cataclysmic violence of the last two years of the war. That the lion's share of the chapters focus on the prewar years is a reflection of the author's stated interest in the broader social dynamics of the dictatorship.
This is a survey text by two scholars at the top of their game and there is thus little with which a reviewer might perform the ritual of book review criticism. Still, one enduring observation I had while reading concerned the lack of sustained engagement with religion. Religion is of course present—sixteen times according to the index—but in almost every case, Christianity in particular is discussed in the context of resistance: the crucifix affairs, the Confessing Church, Pope Pius XI's encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, and of course Clemens von Galen's criticism of the “euthanasia” program. These examples work well for Swett and Wiesen as they analyze the ways in which resistance need not be holistic, but they may have missed an opportunity to fold Christianity into their narrative of accommodation and consent. For example, the German Christians (Deutsche Christen) are mentioned once, en route to a discussion of the Confessing Church, and little systematic attention is given to accommodations and reconciliations between Nazism and Christianity at the doctrinal, institutional, and personal levels. Rather than undermining their argument, deeper consideration would likely have strengthened it, but perhaps this and other issues were simply left on the cutting room floor.
In their pursuit of a complex, multidimensional history, Swett and Wiesen offer a text readymade for the classroom. They routinely balance the coercive, the consensual, and the spaces left for ambiguity and partiality. They ponder, to take just one example, the German women who protested the arrest of their Jewish husbands on Rosenstrasse in 1943. “Were these women heroes? Rescuers? Good wives? Or all of them?” (272) They regularly integrate such reflections on interpretation and debate. Some take the form of correctives to what many students bring to the topic. These include, to note a few examples, a conviction that Germans shared a simplistic racism (85), a condemnatory question about why more Jews did not leave (91), and a belief in the power of brainwashing by an all-powerful propaganda apparatus (123). Beyond these correctives, Swett and Wiesen also introduce issues in the scholarship from specific questions like why, exactly, Hitler declared war on the United States (206), as well as larger foundational issues like the functionalism–intentionalism debate or the importance of European collaboration in the perpetration of the Holocaust. For major historiographical issues such as these, the references and their positions are clear to those who know the scholarship, but they do not digress into specifics, which some readers will be thankful for. In classes where deeper consideration of historiography is a goal, the book would easily pair with any number of readings on those issues.
Ultimately, the book offers something for folks at nearly any level of expertise and exposure to the history of Nazism. First and foremost, Swett and Wiesen have written a supremely teachable narrative that anyone assigning a survey text should consider adopting. For those not looking for a holistic change, individual chapters—and even sections of chapters—could also be fruitfully adopted and woven into your courses. For those who already teach in the same historiographical vein as the text, the narrative will be familiar, but the book features a plethora of wonderful examples and accessible formulations of complex issues. On more than one occasion, I noted details, individuals, turns of phrase, and content organization strategies to fold into my own regular offering. Finally, the book will be particularly useful for those who have not yet engaged with the history of Nazism in any depth. In my experience, undergraduates respond particularly well to the themes of consent and coercion as well as the messy human dynamics so frequently absent in high school or popular culture. Early-stage graduate students will find a digestible narrative built on a deceptively smooth synthesis of generations of historiography. The authors also provide a remarkable resource for those being asked to teach beyond their areas of expertise or balancing a burdensome teaching load. Those seeking a good resource for constructing semester arcs or individual lectures beyond their field will find solid ground here, complete with many suggestions for further reading.
The book captures, I think, Nazi Germany as it should be taught—and perhaps especially so in our contemporary political moment. Swett and Wiesen write explicitly against the one-dimensional conception of Nazism that remains the dominant cultural idiom for most students. Readers find instead a dynamic, human episode in which complex, whole people made individual sense of their world, often readily accommodating dictatorship, sometimes questioning the unpalatable, and occasionally pushing back. To close their introduction, Swett and Wiesen cite Pamphlet 1 of the White Rose and urge their younger readers to consider how those accommodations and objections of the past might remind them to be vigilant in their own present.
