This book surveys the impact of the Nazi regime on German society and culture in light of scholarship published in recent decades. Lisa Pine argues that the Nazi dictatorship used terror, socialization, propaganda, and culture to reorganize German society into a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) that both included and excluded specific social groups. Clearly influenced by British historiography and informed by her own scholarship on Nazi family policy, this survey describes many existing interpretations but unfortunately offers no new synthesis.

Pine introduces her study in the classic style: with the Nazi seizure of state power. She similarly begins each chapter with the Nazi regime, coordinating social and cultural institutions from above. The protagonists here are Nazi institutions as well as the Nazi bigwigs who ran them like petty fiefdoms. Pine describes the violent process of coordination, which she also translates as streamlining (Gleichschaltung): how German trade unions, schools, youth groups, professional associations, cultural institutions, and so on were purged of political and racial enemies by dictatorial fiat. She carefully outlines the wide variety of fates facing differently excluded groups: racial enemies such as Jews and Roma/Sinti, degenerate Aryans who were “workshy” or handicapped, as well as sexual deviants from homosexuals to prostitutes. A courageous few even excluded themselves from the Volksgemeinschaft to resist it: from the women of mixed marriages who protested on Berlin's Rosenstrasse to Jehovah's Witnesses who refused military service.

Pine is particularly concerned with how the Nazi regime convinced Germans to support this new national community as well as a genocidal war for Lebensraum and so on. She does not limit her analysis to the major institutions of terror and socialization, ranging from the Gestapo to the Hitler Youth. She is attentive to a wide variety of Nazi cultural policies: direct propaganda, such as informational films calling for euthanasia for the handicapped; indirect propaganda, such as heroic images of Aryan men in art and sculpture; murderous modes of aesthetic production, such as Nazi architecture built using stone quarried by concentration camp victims; and even attempts to foster a national community through infrastructural changes, such as making inexpensive radios, cars, and autobahns available to Aryans. Pine reviews each case to show that the Nazi regime used everything from newspapers, radios, and films to textbooks, music, and art to nazify popular attitudes. If they were unsuccessful in achieving total saturation of their message, inconsistent in their policies due to disagreements among party bigwigs, or even forced to make concessions to popular taste in some areas, it was certainly not for want of trying.

One suspects that it was Pine's interest in families that led her to place less emphasis on associational life, forced laborers, and neighborly relations as well as the culture of everyday life in general: educational evenings, festivals, parades, rituals, songs, symbols, and so on. Yet these marginalized stories are important precisely because, unlike Auschwitz, they were not “outside the immediate sphere of experience of the German population” (p. 109). More significantly, Pine does not help the reader make sense of the contradictions in the historiography. In terms of modernization, she argues that the Nazis “atomized” German society (p. 27) and “undermined” the family, especially parental authority and autonomy, “in an unprecedented way” (p. 79). Yet the author rejects the thesis that Nazi coordination modernized German society, saying that the Nazis were imperfectly successful in their goals of creating a totalitarian society. German workers, for instance, continued to feel like workers, rather than Aryans, despite the new status and mobility they achieved as managers of racial inferiors forced into labor. In terms of nazification, she recognizes that cliques of young people remained “aloof” from the Nazi youth organizations (pp. 158-60), but she still insists that German youth were “obliged to play their part in the Nazi war effort . . . and to serve the regime until its demise” (p. 65). Pine makes a far more refined argument when it comes to women. She quotes Adelheid von Saldern to say that historians cannot reduce ordinary people to “pure types” of either victims or perpetrators of the Nazi regime (p. 75, see also p. 25). By and large, however, her study treats ordinary Germans, and everyday life, as the object of regime policies rather than independent agents and sites of historical interactions between state and society.

At stake here is how Pine accounts for the creation of “Hitler's” Volksgemeinschaft: whether ordinary Germans had any significant role in the violent work of reorganizing who belonged to the national community, who got excluded, and what happened to them. Pine shows that Nazi policies corresponded closely to the values of the conventional German middle classes—e.g., in their attitudes toward the “workshy” or Roma and Sinti. In keeping with recent scholarship, Pine also depicts Germans soldiers as willing and enthusiastic promoters of genocidal war in keeping with Hitler's goals and ideology. Moreover, because of the large number of German soldiers who fought at some time on the eastern Front, this “fighting community” (Kampfgemeinschaft) was conceptually and pragmatically interwoven into the Volksgemeinschaft (p. 95). Yet when Pine describes those same Germans as members of churches, in schools, as cinema goers, and so on, she depicts them as supporting the Nazis for some other reason, such as nationalism and anti-Bolshevism (p. 90), or really preoccupied with their own concerns, especially during the war (p. 110). Indeed her rhetoric emphasizes how the regime sought to “manufacture consensus” (pp. 7, 40), as if ordinary Germans, by inclination, cooperated with the regime against their better judgment.

Everyday life during the Third Reich was full of the contradictions Pine describes. But the challenge of writing its social and cultural history lies in forming new interpretations to make sense of those contradictions. Had Pine followed these ordinary Germans as they moved between the fragmented elements of everyday life, she might have found a better way to represent them as composite historical subjects.