Volume 17, Number 11 · December 30, 1971
Understanding White Racists
By Robert Coles
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Escape from Freedom
by Erich Fromm
Avon, 336 pp., $1.65 (paper)
Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
by Erich Fromm
Fawcett, 256 pp., $.95 (paper)
The Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno et al.
Norton, 990 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Psychoanalytic Study of Society
edited by Warner Muensterberger, edited by Sidney Axelrad
International Universities Press, vol. 1 pp., $12.00
White Racism
by Joel Kovel
Random House, 300 pp., $1.95 (paper)
One Dimensional Man
by Herbert Marcuse
Beacon Press, 280 pp., $2.25 (paper)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee, by Walker Evans
Ballantine, 428 pp., $1.65 (paper)
The Road to Wigan Pier
by George Orwell
Berkley, 192 pp., $.75 (paper)
The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind
by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills
Harper & Row, 320 pp., $2.25 (paper)
Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel
by C. Vann Woodward
Oxford University Press, 518 pp., $3.50 (paper)
As Hitler's hysterically racist version of fascism year by year strengthened itself in Germany and then spread all over Europe, a generation of intellectuals, not to mention millions of ordinary men and women, had to confront some unsettling questions. Could 'it' (Nazism) happen here or there or, indeed, anywhere? How did the nation of Beethoven and Brahms, Goethe and Schiller and Gropius turn itself over to a bunch of thugs, murderers, and confidence men? Was there something special about such a turn of events, something rooted in the German 'national character,' in a particular people's history and culture? And anyway, why did the Führer's racial hate, directed at so many segments of the world's population, strike so many responsive chords: enthusiastic applause; discreet approval; sympathy; the embarrassed silence of those who suddenly heard spoken on a grand scale what hitherto had to be whispered or joked about in private?
Review, 7065 words
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