Introduction July 1914 November 1918 January 1933 May 1933 Notes Index
The book's strength lies in the vigor and colorfulness with which Fritzsche presents his ideas. He has style and class in his writing, and that should attract general readers as well as specialists. Fritzsche has a sharp eye, moreover, for vivid or illuminating details, and he uses them very effectively to weave his narrative...The book provides a combination of scholarly research and literary skill, a combination too rare in academic works. -- Theodore S. Hamerow, author of On the Road to the Wolf's Lair
Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Everyone knows that the Germans turned to the Nazis when dismay over the Treaty of Versailles mixed with the depredations of the Great Depression. Fritzsche (Reading Berlin), however, quickly points out flaws in the scenario. To start, every party in Germany excoriated Versailles, and the people hardest hit by the recession were not the ones most likely to vote National Socialist. It is as a broader social revolution that Fritzsche attempts to make sense of Nazism. As Kaiser Wilhelm hoped, WWI unified Germany; but after withstanding four years of privations with little help from the monarchy, ordinary Germans emerged with a new sense of their worth within the society and with the German volk, a vitally different entity from the Hohenzollern Empire. By 1933, Germans were law-and-order chauvinists, and Nazis seemed to offer order and a national vision that embraced all the volk. Well researched and succinct, this history offers a nuanced view of a complicated history. As for Germany's uniquely murderous anti-Semitism, Fritzsche notes (without mentioning Daniel Goldhagen by name) that the complicity of so many ordinary Germans in the murder of Jews "was not so much the function of genocidal anti-Semitism which they shared in uncomplicated fashion with Nazi leaders; rather over the course of the twelve-year Reich, more and more Germans came to play active and generally congenial parts in the Nazi revolution and then subsequently came to accept the uncompromising terms of Nazi racism." (Mar.)
Fritzsche convincingly explains the rise of the Nazis as the success of populist nationalism--'the culmination of a process of popular mobilization going back to 1914 and beyond'...This is a fascinating issue--what consciousness of being 'German' was and how it was shaped. A well-crafted, well-informed, well-written and convincing account. It should be accessible to its intended audience of general public and university students. -- Richard Bessel The Open University Peter Fritzsche, in his Germans into Nazis, makes a...crucial point about public opinion in the 1930s and 1940s. He recalls--and this is something that foreigners living in Germany have always understood more readily than academics--that the popular appeal of Hitler's movement lay much more in the hope and optimism it generated than in its various invitations to hate and to fear. -- Neal Ascherson Los Angeles Times Book Review In this book Mr. Fritzsche gives us an original, new and extremely helpful way to understand how Nazi Germany came into being. This is one of the best books on Nazi Germany published in many a month. Contemporary Review Historians examining nations over periods of time have somehow to find a balance between what is inherent in a people and what is not, in order to attempt explanations of national attitudes and conduct. This balance is not often found in the study of Germany during the fateful pre-Hitler period. The question is clear enough: Why did a civilized Central European power suddenly and swiftly descend into moral depths?...[A unified explanation] is unlikely to be found. But Peter Fritzsche has come up with new light on an old question. Instead of starting from 1918, he goes further back, and...looks at Germany as a nation undergoing redefinition, an animal changing out of all recognition...Fritzsche writes attractive, polished prose, and non-specialists should have no trouble in following his line of thought. -- Ralph Amelan Jerusalem Post The question still haunts: Why did Germans embrace Hitler? Dr. Fritzsche rejects the standard view that Germany welcomed Nazism because of the harsh strictures of the Treaty of Versailles, the economics hardships of the Depression or a long-standing hatred of Jews, and argues instead that Hitler's 'program' articulated the aims and desires of the lower and middle classes. Perhaps the most unsettling view in this thoughtful book is that the German people saw Hitler and his plan as embodying their hopes for their future. And what would that triumph have produced? -- Lee Milazzo Dallas Morning News Peter Fritzsche's Germans into Nazis is an interpretive study of the rise of Nazism which uses the key events of four crisis periods--August 1914, November 1918, January 1933 and May 1933--to explain the success of the Nazis in their drive to gain and solidify their power by winning over the German people...This book is gracefully written, provides provocative challenges for more extensive reinterpretations, and is worthy reading for all students of Nazi Germany. -- Paul Bookbinder English Historical Review Drawing on a wealth of documentation, including newspaper reports, historical analyses and studies of everyday life, Fritsche gives a fascinating look at the rise of Nazism, the dynamics of populism and the power of ideology. -- Victoria Barnett Christian Century Well researched and succinct, this history offers a nuanced view of a complicated history. Publishers Weekly Fritzsche presents a well-informed argument that uniquely identifies a political process in the Nazis' climb to power and not just the feeding of racial hatred or the failure of the Weimar Republic. -- Mary F. Salony Library Journal
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