Volume 19, Number 7 · November 2, 1972
The Liberals and German History: Part II
By Geoffrey Barraclough
A History of Modern Germany, 1840-1945
by Hajo Holborn
Knopf, 818 pp., $14.25
Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution
edited by Hajo Holborn, translated by Ralph Manheim
Pantheon, 491 pp., $12.95
Germany Since 1918
by David Childs
Harper & Row, 208 pp., $6.95
Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch
by Harold J. Gordon Jr.
Princeton, 672 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Germany in Our Time
by Alfred Grosser
Praeger, 370 pp., $12.50
The Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945
by Richard Grunberger
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 535 pp., $10.00
Hitler's Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power
by Eberhard Jäckel, translated by Herbert Arnold
Wesleyan, 144 pp., $8.00
Secret Conversations with Hitler
edited by Edouard Calic
John Day, 192 pp., $6.95
For twenty-five years the history of modern Germany, as presented in our standard historical works, has been molded by the assumptions and preoccupations of liberal historiography. I have already discussed the preoccupation with Nazism, which is one of the more obvious characteristics of these studies.[1] But there are other, more fundamental ways in which liberal assumptions have colored the interpretation of modern German history. If I return to the question, therefore, it is not to plough over old ground but to consider the adequacy itself of the liberal interpretation. The point at issue, of course, is not the substantive contribution of a generation of historians to the history of Germany between 1870 and 1945, but the postulates and tacit presuppositions with which they worked.
Review, 6806 words
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