It has become an article of faith that the postmodern world no longer lives in an age of “history.” Rather, it is a time in which powerful elites—media, business, government, military—spend a great deal of time and energy stage-managing what we see, live, and experience. As this powerful new book by German scholar Daniel Siemens argues, all of us, regardless of whether we want to admit it, are still living in the Third Reich.

Every scholar of Nazi Germany knows the story of Horst Wessel. He was a minor figure in the dramatic rise of Hitler, a young street tough, a Nazi stormtrooper, a pimp, and—most improbably—a songwriter, the author of “Die Fahne Hoch” (“Hold the Flag High”), a song that became a second national anthem during the NS-Zeit, and usually goes by the moniker of the “Horst Wessel Song.” As the author of what we might call the Third Reich's “greatest hit,” Wessel usually earns a single paragraph in most histories of the period.

Siemens believes that this is nowhere near enough, and Tod und Verklärung proves him right at every turn. The Wessel who emerges from the pages of this well-researched and tightly argued book was no peripheral figure, but a seminal one. A preacher's son (born 1907) whose youth was shattered by the German defeat in World War I, he was a typical romantic bürgerlich youth of the era. Attracted equally by the resentments of the völkisch movement and its promises of a new “community of race” (Volksgemeinschaft), Wessel sought belonging, joining a variety of student fraternities and political paramilitaries, before eventually winding up in the Nazi SA. We often forget, but in its earliest phase the NSDAP was a party filled with Wessels: young true believers. Horst fought the fight, he staged the provocation marches, and he eventually wound up dead, shot point-blank by communist operatives, in what is usually assumed to have been a crime of passion over a prostitute, but which was more probably the result of a rent dispute with his landlady.

Up to this point, the tale that Siemens tells is hardly unique. Indeed, interested readers might consult the 1938 work by sociologist Theodore Fred Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power, for similar tales of idealistic young people who found their way into the party and wound up paying the ultimate price. What distinguishes Wessel's story is the specific temporal and political context. His murder took place in 1930, at a time when Nazi strength was just beginning to wax in Berlin and when the new Gauleiter of the capital, Josef Goebbels, was first learning how to flex his propaganda muscles. Wessel's death turned out to be a far more significant event than his life. The Nazis transformed his funeral procession (Trauerzug) into a provocation march. There were catcalls from the local communists and even some rock throwing, met by the “Heil Hitlers” of the Nazi faithful. The funeral procession eventually reached its destination, and it is clear today that Goebbels's claim of an attempt by bestial communists to seize the coffin and desecrate it were fabrications.

The historical event, in other words, soon receded in the face of the constructed memory. And once the Nazis came to power in 1933—well, let's just say that the “transfiguration” of the book's title was off and running. Wessel became more than a streetfighter, but a martyr, a handsome and appealing young man who had willingly offered his life for the movement and for the regeneration of Germany. A second trial for his killers took place on the back of the earlier judicial Prozess during the Weimar era, with predictable miscarriages of justice in a system that was already being Nazified. A film about Wessel appeared, Hans Westmar. Einer von Vielen (“one of many”), that left audiences “shaken” and “enraptured” (“erschüttert” and “berauscht”). More disturbing to us moderns, the churches embraced him eagerly, with evangelical Germany claiming him as a Heldenfigur and saint, a fighter whose combative spirit and faith in victory was a living expression of the Church militant. Siemens doesn't target only the Protestants, however. As he notes, Catholics already had their own national saint, Alfred Leo Schlageter, a “martyr” from the Ruhr fight in 1923.

Indeed, it does no good to pick on the churches. The entire German nation was soon in the grip of Wessel fever, a sign of how powerful the appeal of the Nazi revolution was to so many social groups. The education system taught young Germans that Wessel was their “proudest and best comrade,” their lodestar and guide, teaching them how to be a “political fighter for Adolf Hitler and his movement.” Siemens opens his book with an unforgettable set piece: young nymphs of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, the “League of German Girls”) singing and prancing around a circle in the moonlight on Horst Wessel's birthday, imploring his spirit to increase their fertility and help them be good mothers. Wessel had made a long journey after his death: a transfiguration from pimp to fertility god.

It is not easy to lodge a complaint about such a fine book, but one wishes the author had taken time to broaden the argument. The focus here is relentlessly on Wessel, those who knew him, and those peripherally involved in his life, death, and transfiguration. Surely, however, the Third Reich is not the only modern society susceptible to mythmaking. Indeed, we might say that life in the modern world is a minefield of myth and legend building and Inszenierung: singers who cannot sing, writers who cannot write, and dim-witted politicians of every political stripe who claim to have answers to all our problems. In that sense, Horst Wessel is a man for our times, and his “song” a soundtrack for our lives.

Such criticism is only a wish list, however, and perhaps the author was wise to limit himself. Reviewers throw around the term “tour de force” so often that it has become a cliché. It has been years since I have read a book dealing with the early Nazi years with as much interest, excitement, and admiration as I found in this one, however. Siemens's work deserves a broader readership in America, and it should be translated into English as soon as possible so that it can become a part of the curriculum in U.S. undergraduate college courses.