SHIRER'S GIBBON?
Shortly after the War ended, William Shirer, who had observed the rise of the Third Reich, wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and that's been the go-to source for generations of readers. Thirty years later, Richard J. Evans has the opportunity to read through materials unavailable to Mr Shirer, including records held by various Soviet era authorities who lost their power and their monopoly on violence, fortunately without any nukes being released. Yes, we're talking forty years after Shirer's work, not five centuries or so as in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and we have only three thick books to constitute Book Reviews No. 27, No. 28, and No. 29, rather than the six volumes of Gibbon. (That despite typesetting technologies that are far more productive and less eyestrain-inducing than those available in the eighteenth century.)
That noted, Mr Evans, like Mr Gibbon, has the opportunity to digest additional material and to synthesize, and the works are similar in that both start with a reference point from which the tragedy unfolds. In Decline and Fall, we start with the Antonine era, perhaps the last time civus Romanus sum was an unabashed statement of pride. In the first book, The Coming of the Third Reich, we start with Otto von Bismarck, the merger of Prussia with the southern provinces, including for a while Austria, and the victory over France. Bismark is by no means a cartoon figure, and his emergence coincides with the consolidation of European tribal societies into nation-states, something that none of the Germans nor the Iberians nor the Italians nor the French carried off well (and the experiments in North America have a secession crisis and Quebec to continue to work with.) Moreover, if you're looking for ominous parallels with contemporary politics, you might find them throughout Coming and its successors. Careful reasoning will also suggest those parallels might not exist. But a lost war, a hyperinflation, a cosmopolitan avant-garde that enjoys mocking convention, and the odd socialist insurrection in city or province provide reason for social movements that might avoid the restoration of bourgeois convention in favor of a more explicitly identitarian politics. And yes, the National Socialists did appeal to a sense of lost German greatness, whether Bismarckian, or the pre-Napoleonic Holy Roman Empire (the Reich that did last a thousand years.) Again, dear reader, be careful about drawing parallels with the present.
Then comes what might have been the good years of the Reich, documented in The Third Reich in Power, covering the years from Hitler's accession in January 1933 to the start of the World War in September 1939. But those good years were not so good, and not simply because of the persecution of Jews and other ethnic minorities, let alone the introduction of the totalitarian state and the intrigues among the ruling circle. Germany, put simply, was in no condition to engage in the kind of military buildup it would require to provide its people with the living space their government envisioned, and the economy could not generate the foreign exchange to support the purchases of raw materials and fuel the buildup would require, and at the same time sustain a civilian economy. And thus they had to bluff, and successfully bluff they did. At the same time, the totalitarian state sought to enforce an authentic German culture, an authentic German education, an authentic German character. Again, dear reader, be careful about drawing parallels with contemporary identity politics in education or behavior.
And so the war comes, and that's documented in The Third Reich at War. Mr Evans deals only peripherally with the campaigns and the tactics, these being adequately covered elsewhere. There's plenty of material for him to work with all the same, as if Germany was too broke to build up for war, it was certainly too broke to fight a war, and once the easy plunder (from Jews and Poles, primarily) ended, the civilian discontent (which Reich in Power documents as latent, if suppressed) began to bubble up, and as the Red Army recovered and pushed back, and the allied air forces learned how to fly and to bomb (something the Germans, in part because of those intrigues among the ruling clique, never did) the authorities had to expend more power on controlling their subjects, which is not what a country underprepared for war in the first place wants.
Taken together, though, the work is less than profound. Mr Evans's concluding passage.
The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism, and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. That is why the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history.
Hannah Arendt offered the banality of evil. Mr Evans has offered the banality of academic thought.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
That noted, Mr Evans, like Mr Gibbon, has the opportunity to digest additional material and to synthesize, and the works are similar in that both start with a reference point from which the tragedy unfolds. In Decline and Fall, we start with the Antonine era, perhaps the last time civus Romanus sum was an unabashed statement of pride. In the first book, The Coming of the Third Reich, we start with Otto von Bismarck, the merger of Prussia with the southern provinces, including for a while Austria, and the victory over France. Bismark is by no means a cartoon figure, and his emergence coincides with the consolidation of European tribal societies into nation-states, something that none of the Germans nor the Iberians nor the Italians nor the French carried off well (and the experiments in North America have a secession crisis and Quebec to continue to work with.) Moreover, if you're looking for ominous parallels with contemporary politics, you might find them throughout Coming and its successors. Careful reasoning will also suggest those parallels might not exist. But a lost war, a hyperinflation, a cosmopolitan avant-garde that enjoys mocking convention, and the odd socialist insurrection in city or province provide reason for social movements that might avoid the restoration of bourgeois convention in favor of a more explicitly identitarian politics. And yes, the National Socialists did appeal to a sense of lost German greatness, whether Bismarckian, or the pre-Napoleonic Holy Roman Empire (the Reich that did last a thousand years.) Again, dear reader, be careful about drawing parallels with the present.
Then comes what might have been the good years of the Reich, documented in The Third Reich in Power, covering the years from Hitler's accession in January 1933 to the start of the World War in September 1939. But those good years were not so good, and not simply because of the persecution of Jews and other ethnic minorities, let alone the introduction of the totalitarian state and the intrigues among the ruling circle. Germany, put simply, was in no condition to engage in the kind of military buildup it would require to provide its people with the living space their government envisioned, and the economy could not generate the foreign exchange to support the purchases of raw materials and fuel the buildup would require, and at the same time sustain a civilian economy. And thus they had to bluff, and successfully bluff they did. At the same time, the totalitarian state sought to enforce an authentic German culture, an authentic German education, an authentic German character. Again, dear reader, be careful about drawing parallels with contemporary identity politics in education or behavior.
And so the war comes, and that's documented in The Third Reich at War. Mr Evans deals only peripherally with the campaigns and the tactics, these being adequately covered elsewhere. There's plenty of material for him to work with all the same, as if Germany was too broke to build up for war, it was certainly too broke to fight a war, and once the easy plunder (from Jews and Poles, primarily) ended, the civilian discontent (which Reich in Power documents as latent, if suppressed) began to bubble up, and as the Red Army recovered and pushed back, and the allied air forces learned how to fly and to bomb (something the Germans, in part because of those intrigues among the ruling clique, never did) the authorities had to expend more power on controlling their subjects, which is not what a country underprepared for war in the first place wants.
Taken together, though, the work is less than profound. Mr Evans's concluding passage.
The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism, and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. That is why the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history.
Hannah Arendt offered the banality of evil. Mr Evans has offered the banality of academic thought.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)