Christian Goeschel presents readers with an excellent topic: the Third Reich which condemned the Weimar years as, in Hitler's words, the “times … of the incredible suicides in Germany” (p. 57), and anticipated the eventual disappearance of suicide in the fortification of the social body as a racial utopia, ended in an “orgy of destruction” as hundreds of minor and major Nazi figures killed themselves in April and May 1945 (p. 170). There was a discernible spike in suicides, which are generally a relatively sticky social phenomenon, especially in eastern Germany, in front of the advance of the Soviet army, and in Berlin. According to the Catholic psychiatrist Erich Menninger-Lerchenthal, writing after the war, this “organized mass suicide” in 1945 occurred “on a large scale which had previously not occurred in the history of Europe” (p. 171). Although figures are hard to come by, thousands of Germans, including young people who identified their lives most closely with the Third Reich, felt as unable to face the enemy and the destruction of the world they had built as Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring. From 1945, Goeschel unravels the story back to the end of World War I and the downfall of the Kaiserreich, examining the other wave of suicides in Nazi Germany, which occurred among German Jews in the days and weeks before their deportation in 1942 and 1943, as well as the suicides of other victims of the Nazis including homosexuals and soldiers, the deliberate “suiciding” of political opponents in the Third Reich, especially in 1933 and 1934, and the suicidal malaise of the Weimar years. There are many layers to be uncovered, and Goeschel takes pains to differentiate among motivations and contexts of jeopardy.

Unfortunately, the study is not effectively argued. Most of the discussion is simply an enumeration of one case study after another without the clear guidance of an overarching argument. Key baselines, in which Germany is compared with its neighbors and the 1920s with the 1930s and 1940s, are not established at the outset. There is a lot of skipping around, and conclusions, when they come, are often imprecise or empty as in the case of Goeschel's concluding words: “It would be a long time before the impact of this suicidal regime was overcome” (p. 171). Goeschel has some great sources, including a collection of Weimar-era suicide notes. Yet these are not carefully analyzed. The case studies themselves lack drama or conflict, although this is probably due to the summarized and mediated nature of the sources themselves. Still, the examples end up swimming away before the eyes of the reader. Crucial evidence is also overlooked: the anguished discussions in 1941 and 1942 between the novelist Jochen Klepper, his Jewish wife, and his Jewish stepdaughter which can be tracked in Klepper's diaries and letters published after the war. Intertwined in this heartbreaking case are the father's lingering melancholia, the family's precise fear about deportation, the understandable desire of all to remain together somehow, and also the unmistakable yearning of the vulnerable teenage daughter to live. Goeschel also does not take up the suicides of German and Austrian emigrants in exile: Klaus Mann in New York commented extensively on Stefan Zweig's suicide in Brazil in 1942.

Goeschel's main arguments are right-minded, but not completely persuasive. “Suicide in 1945,” he writes, “was not just about showing support for, or identification with, the regime and its leaders, however” (p. 165). There was fear of the Russians and depression about the chaos of defeat, and even guilt about Germany's crimes. But more than that, “many Germans experienced a complete breakdown of norms and values, an anomie,” that was related both to the tightly organized nature of Nazi society and, to follow the argument about norms and values, the identification of people with that society (p. 170). In other words, Goeschel wants to demonstrate limits to the public's political identification with the Nazis but does so by suggesting a much more basic identification with the Third Reich. Goeschel nips at the heels of historians who follow “the now widely popular and largely simplistic hypothesis that the Nazis hardly needed to terrorize Germans who were allegedly enthusiastic Nazi supporters and collaborators right until the regime's downfall” by pointing to the cases in which all sorts of Germans killed themselves out of fear once they found themselves in the clutches of the police or Gestapo (p. 169). But no historian would describe Nazism as a phenomenon without victims and thus without potential suicides. Indeed, one of the reasons the Third Reich began to lose the legitimacy it enjoyed was because more and more Germans, who had clearly made distinctions about healthy insiders and dangerous outsiders, believed that in the last years of the war, the Nazis had begun to attack their own.

Goeschel is right to consider suicides an index of Nazi terror, but this does not necessarily indicate the pervasiveness of terror or the fragility of political legitimacy in everyday life. Moreover, the suicide rate did not change from the depths of the Great Depression to the outbreak of the war, a complicated finding that Goeschel should have unpacked. It contradicts the Nazi view that suicide was somehow a particularly “Weimar” phenomenon. It suggests as well that German suicides are not easily explained as a direct function of economic hardship, but it also qualifies, without negating, Goeschel's contention that Nazi-era suicides self-evidently undermine “fashionable” arguments about popular support for the regime (p. 139). In the end, it seems clear that “suicide in Nazi Germany” was the result both of the terrible jeopardy posed by the Third Reich and of the final jeopardy of its own downfall.

Suicides (in the plural) reveal highly individual tragedies in which every case study is different, but suicide itself (as a collective noun) is also highly predictable as a social statistic, a paradox that Goeschel's study confirms, while refraining from dwelling on the problem of using suicide as a handle on social reality in twentieth-century Germany.