In deciding what to censor and how to censor, societies disclose key details about themselves, including the norms and values they cherish and those they reject, as well as the location and operation of political power. Guenter Lewy's Harmful and Undesirable: Book Censorship in Nazi Germany explores these aspects of the Third Reich by examining Nazi leaders’ efforts to purge German culture of “liberal and Marxist elements” and to “achieve the preeminence of National Socialist ideas” (ix–x). The book is both an analysis of Nazi censorship, as well as a close study of the Third Reich's polycratic structure and the struggles that Adolf Hitler's leadership style encouraged as Nazi leaders competed for “turf” (145), power, and dominance.

Lewy's preface outlines two chief goals: to provide a narrative of Nazi censorship policy based on archival research, and to detail the numerous polycratic political struggles that occurred among the authorities involved in book censorship. The book's four-part structure and extensive use of Nazi-generated documents support these dual goals. The first part briefly examines censorship in the Weimar Republic and provides a lengthier analysis of the 1933 book burnings. The second part studies “The Agencies of Control” in five chapters that successively analyze the institutions and individuals that competed for mastery of book censorship, including Joseph Goebbels's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the Reich Chamber of Literature, the Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst, and Philipp Bouhler's Party Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature, as well as Alfred Rosenberg's numerous efforts to assert supremacy as commissar for Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education. This agency-by-agency analysis permits Lewy to make important points about ongoing struggles for dominance among state ministries, e.g., between Goebbels's ministry and party organizations such as Bouhler's. It also enables him to underscore the fact that many individuals belonged to two or three organizations and agencies simultaneously, thereby tightening the bond between party, state, and the Nazi surveillance apparatus. Other scholars have detailed the regime's polycratic nature, of course, but this section will be particularly helpful to historians seeking to understand the various tactics Nazi leaders used to censor books, to make sense of overlapping jurisdictions, and to untangle personal rivalries.

The third part, “The Practice of Censorship,” details the reasons Nazi bureaucrats provided for banning books, the various strategies they employed to suppress Jewish authors, the policies they used to narrow systematically the public's access to “undesirable” books, and book censorship during the war. The fourth and final part, “The Impact of Censorship,” may be the book's most compelling section. In it, Lewy closely examines the category of “inner emigration” and asks whether specific authors can accurately be described as having participated in this form of opposition. Here he moves beyond the perspective of the regime that is the focus of earlier chapters and explores the choices of individual authors, arguing that writers who stayed and continued to publish—especially those who were considered “prestigious”—not only allowed the regime to present National Socialism as “equally respectable and cultured,” but also offered a “counter-weight to the horror stories about the new Germany's intellectual and cultural barbarity” (192). The book's conclusion very briefly discusses censorship in postwar occupied Germany.

Several aspects of this book make it a valuable study. First and foremost, it offers a careful analysis of Nazi censorship policies and the agencies and individuals who devised and implemented them. Lewy pays close attention to incremental yet monumental shifts in policy and situates censorship in the day-to-day realities of interwar and wartime Germany. One particularly interesting detail that he highlights is the regime's constant struggle to overcome paper shortages and how the pulping of banned books helped to alleviate these shortages—though he stops short of asking whether the regime banned certain books in order to replenish its paper resources. The book also contains numerous brief but interesting biographies of Nazi leaders, and furnishes historians with another useful if familiar study of Hitler's leadership style. Furthermore, Lewy's study of the regime's polycratic structure reveals that, in spite of Nazi efforts to centralize political power, Hitler's regime moved more haltingly than smoothly toward its goal of becoming a strong authoritarian state. Even as Lewy details the ongoing struggles that took place among agencies, ministries, and individuals, his analysis also reveals key moments of cooperation—describing, for example, the working relationship that developed between the Reich Chamber of Literature and the Gestapo.

Lewy's book also raises questions that open the door to further research. For example, he notes that Goebbels was often at odds with other Nazi authorities over the types of books that should be censored. Lewy characterizes this tension as a battle for “turf,” but what if it also stemmed from competing views about commercial culture? Film historians have persuasively argued that Goebbels aimed to create entertaining movies that were subtly ideological. Did he have the same goals for popular fiction? Another question this study raises is whether Nazi leaders feared losing popular support through censorship laws that were too vigorous. Although Lewy notes that Nazi leaders sometimes tempered their tactics to avoid generating “hostile public opinion” (42) outside Germany, he makes little mention of the regime's concerns about domestic public opinion. Finally, Lewy explains that Nazi censors often depended on volunteers to identify and review questionable books and to determine whether such texts belonged on an index of banned titles. He does not analyze or explain who these volunteers were, and one suspects that the Nazi-generated documents he utilizes likely provide little or no information about these individuals. Yet, this evidence suggests that Nazi censorship was not only a top-down project, but also very likely a complex process that benefited from widespread support and assistance at the grass roots.

Harmful and Undesirable is an interesting analysis of Nazi censorship that is concise and yet detailed, well written, and effectively organized. Lewy provides an engaging narrative of Nazi censorship that affirms prior historical analyses, which have argued that the regime represented “a system of feuding fiefdoms” (145).