| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Stephan Malinowski. Vom König zum Führer: Sozialer Niedergang und politische Radikalisierung im deutschen Adel zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Staat. (Elitenwandel in der Moderne, number 4.) Berlin: Akademie. 2003. Pp. 660. €59.80.
This book by Stephan Malinowski addresses one of the classic themes of German history: the baleful role of the nobility in the failure of German democratization. Combining social, cultural, and political history, it greatly profits from the theoretical and methodological sophistication of research on the Bürgertum (bourgeoisie or middle class), a booming field of study in Germany, but one that has not received the attention it deserves in the United States.	1
Using a tremendous wealth of primary sources, the author traces the German nobility's turn to far-right ideology to key elements of aristocratic identity: a lack of individualism, a sense of superiority, ties to the land, anti-urban and antimodern attitudes, as well as an antimaterialism that grew out of the poverty of the East Elbian lower nobility. The latter believed in the importance, not so much of education, but of "character," emphasizing dedication to duty, self-sacrifice, asceticism, repression of emotion, and in-born leadership qualities—values that bred anticapitalist and antisemitic resentments. The only weakness of this section of the book is that it does not explore aristocratic concepts of masculinity in sufficient depth.	. . .

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