The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'm currently reading Hitler's Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum, and I'm a) finding it really compelling and b) depressed after reading some amazon reviews that are taking it and using it as pro-Nazi messaging. Can anyone recommend some good sources directly identifying and criticizing its shortcomings?

# ¿ Sep 5, 2023 07:15

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 14:16

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I appreciate it, I was able to read that particular review earlier, though I hadn't found it very persuasive; Schweitzer spends a lot of space saying that Schoenbaum doesn't cover topics that I am reading him actively cover, and ends by saying he disagrees with Schoenbaum's thesis, then restating it as his own position.

I may give Schweitzer's own book, Big Business in the Third Reich a shot in a year or so when I clean up my reading backlog- and I'll look for other reviews.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Sep 15, 2023

# ¿ Sep 15, 2023 05:12

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

sube posted:

The works which directly criticise Schoenbaum are in German solely, to my knowledge. However, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 is a response in part to various modernization theories with regards to Nazism (Schoenbaum included), so could be what you want for a different narrative.

Thanks, this looks right up my alley. Folks can probably guess why I'm particularly interested in reading about the fascist co-option of, e.g., class-based populism, social institutions, and the subversion of democratic functions at this moment in time.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 06:17

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Thank you for all the recommendations, looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf.

edit: in brief (and I'm still only halfway through), Schoenbaum describes his thesis as being that unlike most other settings, the Third Reich, particularly in the period 1933 to 1939, underwent a "double revolution", consisting of an overlapping revolution of ends- a ideological war against bourgeois and industrial society, and, a revolution of means that consisted of new forms of intensifying bourgeois and industrial activity both occurring of and through the Nazi party and its functionaries. This is reflected in the deployment of populism and general nationalist and socialist ideology during the rise of the Nazi party, and the reversal and general subversion of those ideological commitments in all specific forms once Hitler was in power, while still deploying the same rhetorics.

It was also his diss book, so it's very dense, very well-researched and cited, and not particularly focused.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Sep 21, 2023

# ¿ Sep 21, 2023 08:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

plogo posted:

Schoenbaum counterpoises his theory of twin revolution to Neumann's account in Behemoth, but he only hints at what his critiques of Neumann are. What makes Schoenbaum's theory better than Frankfurt school theories of class in nazi germany? Or I guess other structural theories. Schoenbaum seems kinda in line with like Barrington Moore Jr. or some other similar post war left-ish modernization theorist. Am I on the mark there?

I'm not sufficiently literate in history to speak to your questions- plus I'm only halfway through the book! I'll have to read additional sources like Behemoth to tell.

edit: there is some further discussion of Neumann later in the intro:

quote:

Neumann concluded that the Third Reich was a class society, Emil Lederer that it was classless. Their analyses are among the best we have, but also among the most unreliable. Neither of them was short of information. What was lacking was concepts adequate to interpret it.

[...]

The best formula of all was Hermann Rauschning's Revolution of Destruction. It is surely no coincidence that it was also the furthest from the socialist-capitalist, revolutionary-reactionary, elitist-egalitarian categories that make so much contemporary analysis misleading. With all its limits, Rauschning's book described the Nazi revolution as the novelty it was [footnote omitted].

But without empirical demonstration, it remained an hypothesis, at best an inspired guess, and potentially a logical paradox.

That provides a bit clearer contrast in terms of what Schoenbaum thinks he's doing; something pretty narrow and specific to the subject and more directly linked to available evidence. This appears reflected in his view of Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, where Schoenbaum likes the analysis and hates the conclusions. From what I've read so far, I think he's taking a different tack from Barrington Moore in that he views the circumstances of Nazi Germany's changes as uniquely internally contradictory and hosed up ( he refers to it as "a mad dog among nations"), but also an anomaly that could occur in the future. So far Schoenbaum's politics aren't very clear either, other than hating the Nazis.

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was published the same year as this book, so it's plausible that it either had a huge influence or zero influence whatsoever.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Sep 22, 2023

# ¿ Sep 22, 2023 02:32

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Circling back as I near the end of Hitler's Social Revolution, while I appreciate the caveats and why I need to (someday) read subsequent scholarship on this topic, I do wanna share my favorite part of the text other than its often dense and detailed citations: Schoenbaum occasionally just shivs someone in the middle of an otherwise normal discussion paragraph.

To give one of the milder examples, take this footnote quoting and knifing Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision, even while citing it positively as support for the position that external analysts looking at the Reich without the aid of a "historical-social calculus" would see what they wanted to see:

quote:

"Throughout the past one hundred years, whether the rallying point for German patriotism was the venerable figure of William I, Bismarck, the superficial and spectacular William II, the Marshal President Hindenburg, or, in most recent times, Hitler himself, public opinion in this country (the United States) has always been prone to take the figurehead as the reality. It has overlooked the fact that German policy during the past eighty years has been directed, not by the Chief of State, but by the German General Staff."

The irony of such a proposition in the mouth of a U.S. Undersecretary of State in the year 1944 can only be the subject of awe and respect for human fallibility.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Nov 9, 2023

# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 08:13

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 14:16

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bandiet posted:

I�m sure this is a common question, but what are some good books for background reading to Shakespeare�s history plays? For someone who knows nothing about the history other than how it is presented in those plays.

Brainworm is an English prof and Shakespeare expert and has a thread in A/T, as another good place to look.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2024 03:35

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf