Continuing his previous work on Germany's bourgeois left from 1890 to 1933, Erich Kurlander turns to the ideas and actions of his protagonists in the Third Reich. In contrast to histories of the Nazi era that perceive the seizure of power as a drastic break with the past, especially for individuals and groups not aligned with the regime, the author sees more elements of continuity. This is certainly the case for his portrayal of the liberal democrats' aspirations, strongly shaped by Friedrich Naumann's nationalist, imperialist, social welfare-oriented, and racially inflected transformation of classical nineteenth-century liberalism. But, and this will undoubtedly be a controversial feature of the book, Kurlander also perceives continuities of political action, downplaying many of the totalitarian features of the Nazi regime.

Based primarily on the papers of prominent and not so prominent figures of the DDP, the work's five thematic chapters are all written in an eminently readable and inviting style. The first chapter explores the mixture of grudging consent and greater enthusiasm with which leaders of the Staatspartei, the DDP's post-1930 successor, responded to the Nazi seizure of power. Kurlander demonstrates that former democrats' participation in anti-Nazi resistance movements was marginal, except for a few unusual individuals, such as Fritz Elsas or Hans Robinsohn, both of Jewish descent. In the second chapter, Kurlander investigates the position of liberal journalists in the Nazi regime, focusing particularly on Theodor Heuss, and on chances to express dissenting views. The third chapter deals with feminist leader Gertrud Bäumer, whom Kurlander vigorously defends against charges, leveled both by contemporaries and later historians, of collaboration with the Nazis. In the fourth chapter, the author outlines the liberals' attitudes toward Hitler's foreign policy—generally favorable through 1938, but becoming more hostile at different points between the invasion of Poland and the battle of Stalingrad. In the last chapter, concerning liberals' positions on the “Jewish question,” Kurlander finds anti-Semitism widespread among German liberal democrats, but perceives it as closer to the social discrimination Jews faced in the western democracies during the 1930s, and very different from the Nazis' vehement and ultimately genocidal hatred.

In spite of its modest length, this book is filled with interesting observations and original insights, far more than can be discussed in a brief review. Two interrelated themes of the work are of particular interest: the analysis of the extent of totalitarianism in the Third Reich and the example of liberal democrats in historians' efforts to elucidate the nature of support, acquiescence, and resistance in the German population during the Nazi era.

If much recent work has emphasized the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, Kurlander's book goes in the opposite direction. The liberals he studies evidently had no fear of articulating their frank opinions about the government in their private correspondence. They were even able to publish dissenting views in periodicals such as Naumann's Die Hilfe and Bäumer's Die Frau. Admittedly, such views had to be expressed in circumlocutions and there were sporadic attempts by the authorities to limit these dissenting publications or to harass their editors, but both kept going until almost the end of World War II. Kurlander recounts the story of the journalist Wilhelm Rohrbach, who published a piece in January 1945, calling for a post-Nazi regime—this at a time when Germans were being shot for hanging white sheets out of their windows.

The author sees all this as evidence that the totalitarianism of the Third Reich has been exaggerated, even finding elements of the rule of law in the persecution of the July 20, 1944, conspirators. There are other possibilities here as well. One is the class nature of the Nazi apparatus of political persecution, usually focused on the lower strata of German society, rather than the eminently bourgeois individuals Kurlander is studying, and on former adherents of the socialist and communist parties, rather than pre-1933 liberals. These liberals also had connections to the regime, through one-time colleagues working in high places—Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, Goebbels's press attaché Werner Stephan, or the first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. Although the book's dust jacket is graced with a photograph of Hitler and Schacht together, we learn relatively little about such former liberals, except for some intriguing hints that they remained in contact with their pre-1933 associates.

Kurlander places his research in the context of historians' discussions of non-conforming social milieus in the Third Reich, such as adherents of the pre-1933 labor movement, or church-going Catholics. In contrast to these large groups, the liberal democratic political leaders he studies had already lost all of their supporters during the Weimar Republic, a fact of which they were painfully aware. Theodor Heuss's relationship to the Nazi regime, including the articles he wrote for Goebbels's World War II periodical Das Reich (something Kurlander does not mention), might have greater similarities to that of literati such as Ernst Jünger than to blue-collar workers in Saxony or Catholics in the Münsterland.

Gertrud Bäumer's attitudes toward the Nazis, as Kurlander portrays them, seem not unlike those of the Protestant churches in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Just as the latter proclaimed themselves a church in socialism and used adherence to the main tenets of the regime to criticize many of its features, so Bäumer publicly appeared as a feminist in Nazism, quoting Hitler to denounce the regime's sexist ideas and practices. The controversy over whether Protestants' attitudes involved a tacit criticism or open support of the communist government appears not unlike the debate on Bäumer's position in the Third Reich.

As these examples suggest, Living with Hitler offers a wide variety of opportunities to consider the nature of political agency in totalitarian regimes, and the spectrum of individual responses to them. Certainly filling a gap in the existing scholarship, with its comprehensive portrayal of liberal democrats in the Third Reich, Kurlander's work also provides rich materials for a broader consideration of twentieth-century German history, the age of Total War, and the—by no means yet concluded—era of dictatorial government in the modern world.