It’s tempting to draw parallels between the Hitler era and the present age of ascendant nationalism, and Gellately (History/Florida State Univ.; The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, 2018, etc.) offers reasons to do so.
Which Germans turned out to be Nazis between 1920 and 1945? By the author’s account, just about all of them, eventually, despite protestations of ignorance by many postwar Germans. In fact, as he writes, 57% of Germans answered yes when asked in 1948, “Do you consider National Socialism to be a good idea that was poorly implemented?” Hitler, Gellately reminds us, assumed power with the narrowest of margins, supported by people already in power whose aim was to rid Germany of democracy. He also notes that in the January 1933 election, “no less than 71.6 percent of the vote went to parties with ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ in their titles,” making it incumbent on the Nazis to deliver on the “socialist” in the party name while remaining right-wing in orientation. They did so by offering a big tent for “the broadest possible constituency,” building on three tenets: nationalism, anti-Semitism, and socialism of a particularly German variety that was of and for “racially fit” citizens. Protestants responded favorably, Catholics less so; rural people favored the Nazis, city people the left. Although Hitler talked a good game about abolishing the stock market and reining in business, in the end, he capitulated to the capitalists, mostly abandoning the socialist premise. “No single factor,” writes Gellately, “can account for why ordinary people began opting for the National Socialist Party, though any who did at the very least knew in broad terms what it stood for.” The author ventures that economic insecurity and fear of the other were powerful motives—and that Hitler drew heavily on them in transforming a civil society into a dictatorship with astonishing speed.
A thoughtful, timely study of how Nazism moved from the political fringe to the heart of German life.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-068990-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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