This landmark volume documents a lively conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 2010; it is also a key text in the emerging body of literature generated by the “Volksgemeinschaft debate” that has recently animated scholarship on Nazi Germany. Like many previous debates, it has had “dialogue of the deaf” elements—largely the fault of skeptics, who have often criticized what they imagine the new wave of scholarship to be arguing, rather than what is actually being argued. The conflation of various, often subtly different, positions into one “straw man” has led to a great deal of unnecessarily hostile polemic. This volume does an excellent job of clarifying what has been valuable in the debate amidst the excess of noise that has accompanied it.

As the editors argue in their fine opening essay, the term Volksgemeinschaft is not understood best as a descriptive label of a historical actuality engineered by the Nazi regime. The question of whether the Volksgemeinschaft did or did not exist is wrongly posed, and it simply gets in the way of how the term might help scholars to think through certain issues. Rather, the Volksgemeinschaft figured as an “imagined order,” as the promise of a better future, a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, a legitimating reference point, and a call to action. As many of the essays in the volume make clear, it would be a mistake to think that it embodied a clear, uniform, shared understanding or meaning, rather than a vague, diffuse, variable sense of emotional and ideological commitment. Its hold was momentary and highly situational, and it did not have to transform permanently—still less standardize and homogenize—individual subjectivities; if anything, the opposite was the case.

The book's opening section contains essays by Michael Wildt, Ian Kershaw, and Ulrich Herbert that discuss both the potential and the limitations of the paradigm. As Wildt makes clear, the Volksgemeinschaft was a guiding idea that gained rhetorical purchase by drawing on many preexisting languages of community reaching back to World War I and beyond. This is followed by strong essays under the heading “Ideologies, Administrative Practices and Social Control.” Lutz Raphael explores the openness of National Socialist ideology, which he characterizes as a “heterogeneous assembly of images, texts and buzzwords combined with administrative rules, police orders and laws” (81); these were articulated, enacted, and enforced through practice as much as through verbal statement. He considers that vagueness, which was once seen as a weakness, as having been a strength, for it provided a variety of points of partial attachment to, and many different possibilities of finding positive meaning in, Nazi politics. Armin Nolzen explores the operational codes of the NSDAP, noting that the language of Volksgemeinschaft also became an organizing frame for Nazi “social work” (88), i.e., practice. Volksgemeinschaft stood for a way of doing things and for an accompanying set of dispositions, as much as for a set of systematic ideas in the more theoretical sense of ideology. Gerhard Wolf similarly sees Volksgemeinschaft as embodying what Raphael describes as National Socialism's “Sozialismus der Tat” (79). His account of the “exporting” of the Volksgemeinschaft to Upper Silesia during the war argues that the process of screening candidates for the Deutsche Volksliste rested on a variety of different rationales. Thomas Saarschmidt makes the case for seeing Nazism's regional apparatus as the embodiment of a peculiar kind of efficiency and rationality. Even the most ardent skeptics will have to acknowledge that the Nazi state was a little more coherent and capable of self-organization than the once dominant “structualist” paradigm implied. Jane Caplan examines marriage registration, an everyday bureaucratic act of ascription of racial status that, through routinized practice, erected dividing lines between those who belonged and those who did not. Caplan cautiously examines the meanings that these acts took on for “bureaucrat” (village clerk) and client alike, and suggests that the tedium of paperwork probably generated “reluctant compliance” rather than reflecting “active engagement” (128).

In the section on the “Individual and the Regime,” Andreas Wirsching explores the “illusion of normality” (149) that he sees as central to the promise of Volksgemeinschaft. Birthe Kundrus explores the paradox that apparently adequate levels of provision could generate grumbling during the Nazi era, while shortages were borne stoically in other, less repressive, contexts. This suggests that consumption is better explored as a promise, as a marker of inclusion and exclusion, than as a barometer of how many goods people actually had; for Kundrus, the Volksgemeinschaft was forged, in part, through the generation of a sense of entitlement to goods. Nicole Kramer makes a compelling case for examining women as active participants on the home front, but also provides grounds for skepticism: after all, shorn of the Nazi-specific languages of community mobilization, it is not clear whether what most women were doing—e.g., when they helped evacuees or put out fires—were things that might simply have been described as “doing one's bit.”

Comparison is clearly necessary for bringing out the Nazi-specific dimensions of the “social history of experience” (171) that Kramer rightly advocates, and it is to such issues that Ulrich Herbert is referring in his general essay, which calls for embedding the study of National Socialism more firmly within an account of Western modernity. Frank Bajohr demonstrates in his essay that behavior could have the widest variety of motives—often venal, opportunistic, or just anchored in regular practice, such as business competition—and did not have to be ideologically motivated for it to further the aims of the regime. He also argues persuasively that the key to working with the Volksgemeinschaft concept is to consider it in terms of specific, situationally located practices with cumulative effects, not as a description of a total, permanent social reality. Rüdiger Hachtmann contends in an intriguing essay on gentlemen's clubs that the language of the Volksgemeinschaft was fully compatible with the retention of social distinctions and separated social spheres. Notwithstanding the rhetorical critique of the era's elite “upper ten thousand,” the rarefied milieu of the gentleman's club remained intact, a space in which the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy could either maintain discrete distance from or network with Nazi elites.

Given the prominence of practice as a unifying theme in the volume, an entire section is rightly dedicated to violence. That said, the two core articles in this section are less persuasive because their arguments might have been made without recourse to the term Volksgemeinschaft. Christopher Browning's short, heavily synoptic piece revisits familiar material from his previous work to rehearse commonplace arguments about the relationship among inclusion, exclusion, and the dynamics of violence. Sven Keller's more substantial essay explores the role of violence at the beginning and end of the Nazi regime; there is a danger, however, when arguments that clearly hold water with respect to committed party cadres are transferred by rhetorical sleight of hand to the population as a whole.

The volume closes with three essays that call attention to the limitations of the Volksgemeinschaft paradigm. Johannes Hürter's carefully argued account of the relationship of the old military elites to National Socialism argues powerfully for the redundancy of the term in this context, noting that one can both acknowledge and explain the deep complicity of the military elites in the worst crimes of the regime just as well—and indeed better—without it. Willi Oberkrome notes how little purchase Nazi-specific vocabularies of community gained in many stubbornly traditional rural communities, while Richard Bessel illustrates how quickly the ties of the Volksgemeinschaft dissolved at the end of the war, and how little the language helps to explain the behavior of most ordinary Germans under conditions of collapse.

This is a highly impressive volume that makes a powerful case for taking the Volksgemeinschaft paradigm seriously. Further work is needed to explore how National Socialist thinking and feeling was expressed through its citizens' ways of acting; it would also be worth asking how one might incorporate histories of social practice that were not governed by the regime's racist vision in the same way as many of those presented in this book. But as a document of a debate that has been highly productive in many ways, this volume is clearly destined to become a canonical text in the historiography of the Third Reich.