Becoming a Nazi Town joins a growing number of recent works that emphasize the continuities between the Weimar and Nazi periods. It also joins the ranks of those studies over the past five decades that have focused on a single locality's political, social, and cultural transition to Nazism. In fact, David Imhoof's chosen locality, Göttingen, lies within a hundred kilometers of the sites of two earlier such studies, Northeim and Hildesheim, making for a surprisingly rich scholarship on southeastern Niedersachsen alone. Like these earlier studies, Imhoof examines associational life, though he focuses less on Gleichschaltung per se, and more on the way in which townspeople increasingly used their civic engagement to address economic and social problems outside the narrow political sphere in the years leading up to the Nazi seizure of power. That the voters of Göttingen also addressed their problems within the political sphere seems clear, however, from the support they gave to the Nazi-led bloc in the 1929 municipal elections. In the 1930 Reichstag elections, too, over a third of Göttingen's voters cast a ballot for the National Socialists.

Imhoof seeks to explain this voting pattern, and the general ease with which Göttingen accommodated National Socialism after 1933, by looking at social and cultural practices in three institutions in particular: sharpshooting, the Händel Opera Festival, and cinema, each of which illustrated a growing propensity for militarism, strong male authority, traditional “German” culture, and a racial definition of the German people. For each institution, Imhoof identifies a key turning point prior to 1933 that reveals the townspeople's increasing sympathy for ideas that would later become, or were just in the process of becoming, part of the Nazi agenda. In the case of sharpshooting, the middle-class club leaders’ decision to recruit all men as potential members, regardless of class, illustrated a larger bid “to strengthen male control of the public sphere” (13). The 1928 decision by Händel Festival organizers to forego avant-garde experimentation, with which they had earlier made a name for themselves, set the stage for a later and more conservative “celebration of German culture” (13) when the festival revived under the Nazis in the mid-1930s. In his final section, Imhoof argues that the responses by Göttingen audiences to three 1930 films—The Blue Angel, Westfront 1918, and All Quiet on the Western Front—similarly revealed a broader conservative vision of mass culture in the town. All these case studies clearly suggest a marked shift in aesthetic, social, and even political sensibilities in the late 1920s.

Arguing that this increasingly masculine, nationalist, and culturally conservative vision made Göttingen “Nazi” before 1933 nevertheless blurs some key differences between traditional, patriarchal conservatism and Nazism, which Imhoof never teases apart. He concludes his book by writing, “I have… sought here not to define what a ‘Nazi town’ is but to explain the process by which Göttingen became one” (190). But to show the latter, one needs to do the former. In the 1920s, many groups along the political spectrum promoted strong male leadership, for instance, as Imhoof himself acknowledges when he notes that even the Social Democrats maintained all-male sharp-shooting clubs that “contributed to the notion that men controlled this ritual of civic duty” (47). Moreover, many groups that had little sympathy for Nazism also longed for a Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), again as Imhoof himself points out, writing that cultural activities helped townspeople “envision a Volksgemeinschaft, if not necesarily the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft” (5–6). That is the point, though: if these associations were not promoting a specifically Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, then perhaps their longing for community did not point ineluctably toward National Socialism. Imhoof even offers examples where Göttingen's cultural conservatism clashed directly with Nazi ideology, e.g., when townspeople protested the 1932 film Das Recht des Kindes (written by NSDAP member Thea von Harbou), which promoted two central elements in the Nazi Party's pronatalist policy: dissuading women from having abortions and destigmatizing childbirth out of wedlock.

The book's argument that Göttingen had become Nazi before 1933 also necessarily downplays the dramatic changes that Adolf Hitler's so-called seizure of power brought to the three institutions investigated in this study. That is especially true of the purging of Jews from Göttingen's associational life, which receives only passing mention in the sharpshooting and opera sections. But it is also true of the forced closure of many hitherto thriving associations that came in the immediate wake of the establishment of the new regime—and the coerced reorganization of the remaining ones.

Becoming a Nazi Town is nevertheless worth reading. It is filled with careful research and illuminating details about small-town life in interwar Germany, many of which actually highlight the role that compromising local officials played in the process by which Göttingen “became” Nazi. Imhoof neatly traces the chameleon-like career of Bruno Jung, for instance, the opportunistic politician from the German People's Police (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP) who served as Göttingen's mayor from 1926 to 1938: a man whose work “epitomizes the synthetic process of turning this Nazi town into a city of the Third Reich” (18). The attitudes of leaders also explained why Göttingen was never a republican town in the first place. As Imhoof writes in his conclusion, “one major explanation for the atmosphere in Göttingen that fostered Nazism's growth was the lack of substantive change in personnel and ideas to match the new Weimar Republic's formation” (187–88).

It is possible that Göttingen did not so much become a Nazi town as simply remain a conservative one, with leaders who proved increasingly willing to accept and then abet the Nazi rise to power. The values whose rise Imhoof charts in his three institutions were not exclusive to Nazism, but, as his rigorously documented examples show, they provided enough common ground between conservatives and National Socialists for Göttingen's officials to make the devil's bargain that ultimately delivered the town into the hands of the Nazis.