In the past ten years, the field of scholarship on the Nazi era in general and the Holocaust in particular has seen massive transformations. Why read a new book that combines texts published for the most part in the 1980s and 1990s, even if they were written by one of the most preeminent historians? Ian Kershaw himself seems doubtful about the merits of this anthology, especially in light of the fact that the editors arranged his articles along topical, not chronological lines which makes it more difficult to retrace the evolution of Kershaw's interpretation. Still, for anyone who savors highly insightful essays written by an expert historian who participated in all major debates on the subject, this is an excellent book. Four chapters—“Hitler and the Final Solution,” “Popular Opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany,” “The Final Solution in Historiography,” and “The Uniqueness of Nazism”—guide the reader on a path that leads to the currently prevailing interpretations of the Third Reich, its leader, and its followers.

As reflected in the book's structure, Kershaw's investigations of the Third Reich focus on the two opposite ends of the social historian's analytical spectrum: on public opinion—more pointedly: what Germans knew and thought about the “final solution”—and on Hitler, his role in the Nazi system, and the process leading up to the Jewish genocide. Readers unacquainted with his oeuvre will find this collection of essays a succinct introduction to Kershaw's approach as well as a fair summary of the arguments advanced by his critics. In addition to familiar concepts Kershaw has either coined himself or helped to introduce into the scholarly canon—the most well-known being his interpretation of anticipatory compliance summed up in the phrase “working towards the Führer” (pp. 41–44), his description of the “Führer myth” (pp. 130–35), and his dictum that the road to Auschwitz was “built by hate, but paved with indifference” (pp. 5, 186)—the book offers insights one would expect from more recent publications, not articles with long passed use-by dates.

In his introduction, the only original contribution to the volume, Kershaw rephrases some of his key arguments on how the Third Reich functioned and what made it unique. Nazism “produced the most absolutist form of ideology” which, in combination with an advanced bureaucratic apparatus and highly developed technology, facilitated the Holocaust (p. 23). As for the main agents and driving forces of this process, Kershaw's interpretation is more top-down than bottom-up, a rather refreshing deviation from the prevailing historiographic mainstream. Yet, his argument is partly self-defeating: if Hitler intervened “to signal the need for radical action by his underlings” who understood “the ‘wish of the Führer’ without any need for explicit orders” (p. 21), we have reason to believe that on-site agents played a greater, more important role for bringing about genocide than the man at the top who legitimized and facilitated, but rarely directly initiated the actions of his subordinates. Kershaw's “dialectic of radicalization” (pp. 20, 101–4) seems too simplistic an analytical model in view of the complex and multilayered interaction described in greater detail by Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, and others.

This anthology highlights different lines of investigation in a field of scholarship that from the vantage point of the present appears unified around the primacy of the Holocaust. Ian Kershaw, like many other historians of his generation, came to address the genocide of the Jews as a result of his research into the Nazi system, not the other way round; in fact, he decided on the inclusion of “a thematic chapter relating to Jews” in his book on the Hitler-myth years after its first publication (p. 4). Not surprisingly, then, Kershaw's emphasis on the disastrous potential of the “ideologically driven modern state” (p. 372) transcends the Nazi case and echoes similar interpretations by genocide studies scholars such as Mark Levene and Donald Bloxham. Similarly thoughtful and noteworthy are his comments on the largely negative scholarly impact of public debates from the “Historikerstreit” to the “Goldhagen debate” and his critical remarks about the current state of the field. Not everyone who has read more recent books on the topic of German public opinion (by Bernward Dörner, Frank Bajohr, and Dieter Pohl) will share Kershaw's concern about “the likelihood of diminishing returns” (p. 11); actually, this warning seems more applicable to future work on Hitler's role, especially in light of Kershaw's brilliant Hitler biography.

What, one might speculate, would Kershaw have found had he chosen to move on from his work on German public opinion not to writing the “social history of Hitler” (p. 59) he envisioned in the early 1990s, but to analyzing in greater detail the medium strata in the system: those organizations, groups, and elites in Germany that played a crucial, though not necessarily the most visible role in the Holocaust? This question might seem unfair in view of Kershaw's achievements; still, had he focused more on those “working towards the Führer” in the killing fields and camps, he would have helped us gain a better understanding of the era and German mass crimes than currently available.