Volume 3, Number 11 · January 14, 1965
The Roots of Nazism
By Walter Laqueur
The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
by George L. Mosse
Grosset & Dunlap, 373 pp., $5.95
The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria
by Peter G.J. Pulzer
John Wiley, 364 pp., $2.65 (paper)
For most people who have not lived in Germany, the essence of Nazism remain a riddle. Americans, Russians, Frenchmen, and the British usually try to interpret it in terms of militarism, anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, and imperialism. All these were elements in Nazism, yet they existed in other counries as well. I suspect that some of the obstacles to understanding are linguistic in character; for whenever one tries to describe and analyze what was unique in Nazism—the voelkisch ideology, the blood and soil doctrine, the whole Nordic hero myth—one runs into a language barrier and comunication breaks down. The very word voelkisch, for instance, is untranslatable, and not only in English. (In Russian it was rendered for a long time as narodnicheski, i.e., populist. One can easily imagine the resulting political confusion.) A courageous effort has been made from time to time to explain in English what Nazi doctrine was all about, but the result was either utterly confusing or downright comic, and the topic was, after all, not in the least funny.
Review, 2345 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |