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Review
| The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts, edited by Robert Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 455 pages. $27.95, paper.
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| The Nazi Germany Sourcebook is a welcome addition to the body of work available to teachers covering the Third Reich. Both in its outstanding collection of primary sources, and its concise, analytical essays introducing each of the seven chapters, the volume provides important insight into the nature of Nazism. The editors conceive of their book as a further contribution to an array of existing answers to pressing questions about this period, including the most primary one: "How could such an event have occurred?" (p. xxiii) Stackleberg and Winkle, therefore, use as a selection criterion for their volume those documents that can best illuminate the origins and essence of Nazism and its effects. Their contention that primary documents are important building blocks of history is particularly appropriate for the Nazi period, considering the large number of questions about which historians have not yet reached consensus. For example, on the controversial question of the role anti-Semitism played in attracting the economic elites to the movement, it offers Hitler's two and one-half hour speech to the Industry Club in Dusseldorf in 1932 (pp. 103–113) in which he argued to business leaders that Nazism was an important bulwark against communism while avoiding the overt accusations against Jews that he readily employed elsewhere. In "The Diary of Erika S," the teenage daughter of a former SPD official specifically mentions hearing about thousands of women who were "sent to the gas chambers" (p. 326). The editors' overall choice of documents is a good one, including both the usual required documents (Hitler's Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939, for example), and a wide range of eyewitness accounts and personal diaries, including the Goebbels diaries, newly discovered when the Soviet archives were opened. |
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Covering a wider time span (from 1850 to 2000) than is customary in Nazi source books, this volume begins with a chapter on "The German Empire and The First World War," and concludes with "The Aftermath of Nazism" (including the German historians' controversial debate over the revision of the history of Nazism precipitated by Ernst Nolte in the 1980s). This expanded chronological coverage is one of its greatest strengths as a teaching tool, allowing a serious consideration of the growing nationalism and anti-Semitism in Germany prior to World War I. Beginning with Richard Wagner's essay, "Judaism in Music," the documents demonstrate the close link between nationalism and anti-Semitism and help explain how racial anti-Semitism gained respectability, thus paving the way for the later, positive reception to Hitler's racist ideology. Similarly, the documents in the concluding chapter on the aftermath of Nazism demonstrate how clearly historians' understanding of the Nazi period is affected by changes in the world political scene and how the memory of this period continues to have an impact on policy and politics. Another student-friendly aspect of the book is a six-page chronology at the beginning that helps readers understand the historical context for each document. Although the editors offer the caveat that the chronology makes no claim to completeness, it is in fact a wonderfully detailed and symmetrical beginning with Bismarck's unification in 1871 and ending with reunification in 1990. Still another feature that makes The Nazi Sourcebook a useful teaching text is the clearly readable, even elegant translations of the documents, most of which Stackleberg and Winkle did themselves. Those who have wrestled with the German language in their own research, or who have had to rely upon more awkward translations, will particularly appreciate the gracefulness of the translations in this volume. Finally, the concise, indispensable essays that introduce each chapter are models of clarity and analysis, and offer lucid explanations of the historical context for each document. These essays allow the volume to serve as much more than an anthology of documents, but as a stand-alone teaching text as well. It would be best supplemented with a biography of Adolf Hitler (there is little about Hitler the man or his background in this volume), and a book that gives voice to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust (even the chapter on "The Final Solution" in this volume focuses primarily on the voices of the perpetrators). Given the complexity of the topic, it is unlikely that one can find a single text to assign for complete coverage of the Nazi period in a survey course. However, teachers who have room to assign only one book would do well to consider The Nazi Sourcebook. |
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| California College of the Arts |
Amy R. Sims |
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