Volume 44, Number 9 · May 29, 1997
Becoming Hitler
By Gordon A. Craig
Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933
by Henry Ashby Turner Jr.
Addison-Wesley, 255 pp., $25.00
Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume One: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939
by Saul Friedländer
HarperCollins, 436 pp., $30.00
Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History
edited by Michael Burleigh
St. Martin's, 198 pp., $35.00
We are understandably reluctant to attribute world-shaking events to trivial causes. In our historical explanations we are biased in favor of great impersonal forces and long-term trends and dominant political and cultural developments, and are uneasy with the contingent, the unexpected, and the accidental. Thus, in trying to understand Adolf Hitler's coming to power in Germany at the end of January 1933, we are apt to look for its roots in the evolution of German politics since the failure of the revolutions of 1848 and in such things as the domination of German politics in the late nineteenth century by a feudal elite and a nationalistic middle class; and we are also likely to cite the social tensions caused by the rise of a militant working-class movement, the weakness and fragmentation of German liberalism, the susceptibility of part of the population to pseudoscientific theories of race, a foreign policy that was prone to military adventurism, and the horrendous and lasting effects of the military collapse of 1918.
Review, 5321 words
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