Awards
- Winner of Milton Prize 2015; George L Mosse Prize 2015;.
Overview
When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 they promised to create a new, harmonious society under the leadership of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. The concept of Volksgemeinschaft - 'the people's community' - enshrined the Nazis' vision of society'; a society based on racist, social-Darwinist, anti-democratic, and nationalist thought. The regime used Volksgemeinschaft to define who belonged to the National Socialist 'community' and who did not. Being accorded the status of belonging granted citizenship rights, access to the benefits of the welfare state, and opportunities for advancement, while these who were denied the privilege of belonging lost their right to live. They were shamed, excluded, imprisoned, murdered. Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazis' project of social engineering, realized by state action, by administrative procedure, by party practice, by propaganda, and by individual initiative. Everyone deemed worthy of belonging was called to participate in its realization. Indeed, this collective notion was directed at the individual, and unleashed an enormous dynamism, which gave social change a particular direction. The Volksgemeinschaft concept was not strictly defined, which meant that it was rather marked by a plurality of meaning and emphasis which resulted in a range of readings in the Third Reich, drawing in people from many social and political backgrounds.Visions of Community in Nazi Germany scrutinizes Volksgemeinschaft as the Nazis' central vision of community. The contributors engage with individual appropriations, examine projects of social engineering, analyze the social dynamism unleashed, and show how deeply private lives were affected by this murderous vision of society.
Full Product Details
Author: Martina Steber (Research fellow, Research fellow, Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin) ,
Bernhard Gotto (Research fellow, Research fellow, Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.20cm
, Height: 3.00cm
, Length: 24.00cm
Weight: 0.704kg
ISBN: 9780199689590
ISBN 10: 0199689598
Pages: 358
Publication Date: 08 May 2014
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
For an overview over research the volume is most useful, and many contributions point out the direction for future research on the Nazi regime refusing to continue the tiring controversies of the 1980s. The most innovative chapters show that it was its call to action that rendered the discourse on Volksgemeinschaft so powerful in establishing community. Wolfram Pyta, Frankfurter Allgemeine
well worth reading, with much enlightening detail and interesting ideas. * Jill Stephenson, Perspectivia.net *
This is a highly impressive volume that makes a powerful case for taking the Volksgemeinschaft paradigm seriously ... as a document of a debate that has been highly productive in many ways, this volume is clearly destined to become a canonical text in the historiography of the Third Reich. * Neil Gregor, Central European History * The most innovative contributions show that the community-building potential of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' discourse was founded on its pertinence for action: It offered an action-oriented worldview which provided even those, that remained in ideological distance to the Nazi regime, with a number of options, and thus functionally stabilized the system by practical action. * Wolfram Pyta, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung * Steber and Gotto have brought together a team of esteemed scholars, and most contributions are of high quality. What these make clear above all, it that historians and other researchers should take the concept of Volksgemeinschaft seriously when studying Nazi Germany and the policy of the National Socialists. The vision of 'the people's community' was not just propaganda: it steered policy. * Martijn Lak, European History Quarterly * The new frame of reference gives this volume remarkable coherence, wherefore it can claim its rightful place in the currently controversial debates about the Nazi 'Volksgemeinschaft.' * Adelheid von Saldern, Historische Zeitschrift * The volume's strength certainly lies in the felicitous connection of a theoretical conceptualization and historiographical integration of the Volksgemeinschaft approach with source-based case studies. * Nils Loeffelbein, Neue Politische Literatur * The volume impresses with its high degree of coherence and shows the productivity of a many-faceted analysis of 'Volksgemeinschaft', inspired by cultural history approaches, for the social history of the Nazi regime. Above all, this is due to the introduction which stresses the 'making' of the 'Volksgemeinschaft'. By doing this it brings together hitherto opposed interpretations and opens the perspective for social practices in a fluid new frame of reference in which ideas about individuality and normality were fundamentally connected with exclusion and violence. * Lu Seegers, Sepunkte *
For an overview over research the volume is most useful, and many contributions point out the direction for future research on the Nazi regime refusing to continue the tiring controversies of the 1980s. The most innovative chapters show that it was its call to action that rendered the discourse on Volksgemeinschaft so powerful in establishing community. Wolfram Pyta, Frankfurter Allgemeine This is a highly impressive volume that makes a powerful case for taking the Volksgemeinschaft paradigm seriously ... this volume is clearly destined to become a canonical text in the historiography of the Third Reich. Neil Gregor, Contemporary European History well worth reading, with much enlightening detail and interesting ideas. Jill Stephenson, Francia-Recensio
well worth reading, with much enlightening detail and interesting ideas. Jill Stephenson, Perspectivia.net
Author Information
Martina Steber is Research Fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich previously she was based at the German Historical Institute London. Her first book Ethnische Gewissheiten: Die Ordnung des Regionalen vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (2010) is an enquiry into the significance of regionality in German political culture in the first half of the twentieth century. She has published on the history of historiography, and on contemporary British and German political history. Currently she is co-editing a collection which scrutinizes German ideas of 'the West' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and completing a book on political languages of conservatism in West Germany and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. Bernhard Gotto is research fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich. In 2006 he published Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik: Administrative Normalität und Systemstabilisierung durch die Augsburger Stadtverwaltung 1933-1945, which reevaluates the impact of urban administration in Nazi Germany. As well as several books on economic history in the 20th century, he has co-edited two volumes on crisis and the perception of crisis in Germany and France in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 2012 he has coordinated a Leibniz Graduate School on Disappointment in the 20th Century. His current research project scrutinizes the effects of disappointment on democracy in West Germany from 1960 to 1989.
