The coming of the Third Reich
Richard J. Evans (Author)
There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand. In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's; representative institutions were thriving, and competing political parties and elections were a central part of life. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin? A synthesis of a vast body of scholarly work integrated with important new research and interpretations, Evans's history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as he shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur. The first book of what will be a three-volume history of Nazi Germany.--From publisher description
History
xxxiv, 622 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 24 cm
9780143034698, 9781594200045, 1594200041, 0143034693
1105146620
The legacy of the past
German peculiarities
Gospels of hate
The spirit of 1914
Descent into chaos
The failure of democracy
The weaknesses of Weimar
The great inflation
Culture wars
The fit and the unfit
The rise of Nazism
Bohemian revolutionaries
The beer-hall Putsch
Rebuilding the movement
The roots of commitment
Towards the seizure of power
The great depression
The crisis of democracy
The victory of violence
Fateful decisions
Creating the Third Reich
The terror begins
Fire in the Reichstag
Democracy destroyed
Bringing Germany into line
Hitler's cultural revolution
Discordant notes
The purge of the arts
Against the un-German spirit
A revolution of destruction?