Volume 34, Number 12 · July 16, 1987
Getting Along with Hitler
By Gordon A. Craig
Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life
by Detlev J.K. Peukert, translated by Richard Deveson
Yale University Press, 288 pp., $25.00
In Hitler's Germany: Daily Life in the Third Reich
by Bernt Engelmann, translated by Krishna Winston
Pantheon, 335 pp., $21.95
Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, The Family, and Nazi Politics
by Claudia Koonz
St. Martin's, 556 pp., $25.00
One of the most interesting tendencies in West German historiography in the last decade has been to turn away from the great themes of state policy, national and economic development, and theories of fascism and modernization, to a new emphasis upon everyday life and the experience of ordinary people in their family, occupational, and regional settings. The shift was not entirely unheralded, for German historians had been impressed by such classics in the depiction of the lives of the 'little people' as E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. But the sudden surge of enthusiasm for the new mode that began in the late Seventies was so pronounced and the claims of its advocates so vehement that it seemed to be more than a scholarly phenomenon. The Bielefeld University historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler was probably correct in suggesting that it had its roots in the general mood of uncertainty engendered by such events as the environmental crisis, the coming of massive unemployment, and the escalation of the arms race, and that, like the emergence of the Greens, with which it was not disconnected, it was characterized by a new skepticism, a new distrust of existing authorities and their theories and ideas, and a new insistence upon seeing things differently that grew out of that mood.
Review, 4556 words
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