Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Re: Well-done, ER

Re: Re: Re: Well-done, ER
ER — (archived)

I'm not familiar with Evans' work, but I encourage you to read Shirer, too. He speaks to us as a veteran of those times, and from the 1960s, so his own personality and opinions can be viewed with historical perspective. He is extremely readable, he was a journalist by training, not a historian. That makes a difference. Modern historians don't like Shirer, they feel he has not taken advantage of recent scholarship, but that's what historians always say. It's their job to revisit and revise, and I find Shirer taking sides and being opinionated refreshing after the mealy-mouthed "objective" prose of the moderns. Shirer firmly believes the Third Reich was made possible, if not inevitable, by the German national character itself: Naziism has cultural (but not racial) roots, an opinion which would be outrageous and unacceptable in a modern historiographer. I see similar cultural roots in American society. And of course, the sheer wealth of Shirer's documented references is still the place where even the moderns who criticize him go to get started.

I also highly recommend "Winter: the story of a Berlin family" by Len Deighton.
About two brothers born at the turn of the century and come of age during the Nazi years. The book is a novel, but sometimes fiction can allow you to express insights no mountain of cold statistics can make clear.

What happened in Germany is the key to the 20th century. Communism was installed by a small cadre of disciplined professional revolutionaries, almost from outside, both in Russia and China; but National Socialism was to a very great extent a grass roots phenomenon. It came out of the middle class of one of the most cultured and advanced societies on the planet. If it happened there, it can happen anywhere.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (53 posts)

Related discussions