Edward Westermann tells two parallel stories of intoxication: one about the physical act of drinking and the social role of drunkenness, and another about the metaphorical intoxication of being drunk on power. While they at times veer apart, they entwine throughout the book to contribute to our understanding of belonging in a hypermasculine community. As a whole, the book uses drinking practices to analyze cultures of masculinity before, during, and after acts of extreme violence.

At the core of the book, Westermann argues that alcohol facilitated not only violence but the culture of superiority on which violence depends. While scholars have long known that excessive drinking features prominently in practices of violence, less attention has been paid to precisely what that relationship looks like. For Westermann, drinking was a fundamental part of the rituals of masculinity and camaraderie that undergirded the extreme violence of Nazism. Readers familiar with inebriated killers drowning inhibition or remorse here confront drinking games, sing-alongs, and braggadocio. Westermann repeatedly shows how perpetrators boasted, joked, and competed—about their capacities for both drinking and killing—and thereby measured their manliness and policed the boundaries of belonging, not only through outward exclusionary violence but through internal norms, hazing, and fraternal bonding. Drinking and drunkenness were thus formative of the masculine communities that thrived on and perpetuated the intoxication of power over the Other.

The book has a rough chronology from the 1920s to the 1940s, but the bulk of the content is thematic. The first chapter, “Alcohol and the Masculine Ideal,” roots the culture of drunken violence in the aftermath of the First World War, the Freikorps, and the camaraderie of SA brawlers. The chapter pushes back against the prevailing historiographical weight given to the war as the precondition for extreme violence, but most of the book revolves around thematic analyses of the war years. Subsequent chapters cover such topics as rituals of humiliation, sexual torture, trophy taking, and the competitive and celebratory cultures of the perpetrators, from the SS and police apparatus to the Wehrmacht and auxiliary forces. The chapters are relatively freestanding and might be effectively assigned in undergraduate courses, and the book as a whole will be a welcome addition in graduate seminars on consumption, gender, and violence.

Throughout the book, Westermann works to balance his claims to causality, insisting that alcohol is “neither necessary nor sufficient” (12) to explain extreme violence but nonetheless contributed to the cultural practices of masculinity that underpin it. This approach represents an important departure from the notorious arguments of Norman Ohler that Nazi violence was directly and causally tied to ubiquitous substance use and abuse (Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany [2015]). Still, in his laudable efforts to avoid direct causality, Westermann oscillates somewhat between an additive, alcohol-was-there-too approach and a powerful analysis of violent masculinity drunk on alcohol and power. Chapters 2 and 5 may best capture this tension. In the former, Westermann offers a gruesome reconstruction of how aggressive and intimate camaraderie was forged through rituals of savagery and humiliation—from physical torture to mockeries of the Jewish faith. Throughout, however, alcohol scarcely appears, and when it does, it seems something of an afterthought. On the other end of the spectrum, chapter 5, “Celebrating Murder,” painstakingly reconstructs post-murder banquets and chronicles how executioners feasted and took shots of liquor next to murder pits. It repeatedly drives home how “drinking ritual and celebration . . . served to normalize the killing space, to cement male camaraderie, and to bind the perpetrators in a shared sense of purpose at the site of extreme transgressive violence” (120). In such moments, Westermann is at his best in doing justice to both his pithy claim that alcohol is “neither necessary nor sufficient” and his central argument that alcohol directly contributed to the culture of masculinity that facilitated genocidal violence.

There is much to praise about this book. Westermann excels at capturing intimate cultures of drinking and violence, demonstrating his command of the source material and narrative skill as a historian. As just one small example, he repeatedly uses sensory history to great effect. The repulsive but pervasive smell of blood and death more than once brings the reader into the killing fields. Soundscapes, too, play a particularly important role—from survivor testimonies about the haunting laughter and yelling of the perpetrators to the role of music and singing in solidifying masculine bonds in bouts of sadism or murder. Music and song repeatedly capture the celebratory and ritualistic dynamics by which the perpetrators performed their masculine camaraderie.

For all the things Westermann makes painfully explicit, this is also a valuable book for its broader implications for the study of masculinity. The book's content can be emotionally trying, and even the most seasoned scholars of genocide may struggle with the fact that in almost three hundred pages, there is hardly a single paragraph that does not describe an instance, and often several, of extreme brutality, sadism, torture, or murder. Still, the core argument is entirely too familiar. Westermann's analysis of hypermasculine camaraderie, drunkenness, and brutality resonates with ongoing conversations about fraternity culture on college campuses as well as much larger confrontations with contemporary toxic masculinities. The book is, in the final analysis, an important contribution to broader conversations about alcohol, masculinity, and power.