Abstract
Reviewed by: Jill Stephenson, University of Edinburgh, UK
The scholars assembled by Lisa Pine in this welcome volume are mainly from the United States, where German history prospers. The editor outlines their contributions in her introduction and, in addition, sketches some aspects of the evolution of the social history of Nazi Germany. The book is divided into three sections: food and health; lifestyle, including fashion, tourism, sport and art; and religion. Several of the contributors are authors of monographs on the same or related subjects. Given how much attention has been focused on social life in Nazi Germany, it is refreshing to have some less well-ventilated approaches investigated here. The chief point of interest is that the essays show that Nazi control was not always as complete as has been assumed. This should not surprise us. When one is young, 12 years seems a lengthy period. Yet by any objective measure it remains a short span. Having spent years arguing that Nazism did not permeate German society to the extent that has sometimes been claimed, this reviewer now finds it remarkable that a regime could effect as much control as the Nazis did in as short a time.
The major caesura in these essays is the transition from peace to war. Areas such as tourism (Kristin Semmens) and sport (David Imhoof) were seriously constrained by the demands of war. In matters such as food and diet (Nancy Reagin), fashion (Irene Guenther) and health (Geoffrey Cocks), the war changed everything, no matter how much the regime tried to cushion German ‘Aryan’ citizens from privation by reducing non-‘Aryans’ to utterly miserable standards. The regime also tried to pretend that wartime privation did not hurt ‘Aryans’. Guenther shows how, for public consumption, the pretence was maintained that fashionable clothes remained available. But, for Reagin, the war helped to embed the regime’s rationing and consumption imperatives because so many more Germans were eating meals in an institutionalized setting and were eating foods that had been dried or frozen. Cocks shows how, from the start, Nazi propaganda and language made Germans more anxious about their health. He includes one of the most illuminating sentences this reviewer has read about Nazi Germany: ‘The travails of body and minds under the demands of Nazism were also of such magnitude that Germans’ concern with health and illness consumed space for empathy with the much greater sufferings of Jews and other Nazi outsiders who were excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft’ (77).
Both sport and tourism were controlled to reflect Nazi priorities, although in Göttingen, the focus of Imhoof’s essay, local turf wars ensured that some individual interests prevailed. Semmens shows how the Nazis coordinated the tourist industry, imposing close control over it – with, for example, limits on group travel abroad. Travel agents regarded the Nazis’ ‘Strength through Joy’ leisure organization as an unfair competitor because of its lower prices, but many middle-class Germans preferred travel agents’ services to its mass organized travel. Joan L. Clinefelter argues that art became accessible to more Germans in Nazi Germany, but that ‘the success of both the Volksgemeinschaft itself and its culture proved to be more imaginary than real’ (204).
The least convincing section is that on religion. The essays by Christopher J. Probst and Kevin Spicer are worth reading on their own terms, but they do not engage with the day-to-day lives of German civilians. Probst focuses on anti-Semitism in the Evangelical church, particularly through the conduct of two contrasting churchmen. Spicer rehearses the mostly well-known tale of relations, and frictions, between the Catholic Church and the state, but he redeems himself in his conclusion with a pertinent story about an unauthorized pilgrimage in a rural area. The final essay of the book, by Joe Perry, on the Nazis’ attempts to infiltrate and remodel Christmas celebrations from the 1920s, is a delight. Some assimilated an at least partly de-Christianized Christmas, while others regarded the new Nazi ‘hymns’ as outrageous. Christmas became a real battleground between church and state for the allegiance of individuals and communities. In wartime, Christmas emphasized the absence of missing family members and shortages of festive and everyday goods.
Editing a volume requires a vigilant eye, and this volume is, for the most part, well edited. There are a few inconsistencies that could have been ironed out. But what jarred was an unfamiliar usage in Nancy Reagin’s essay. Reagin uses six times the term ‘put up’ – not as in ‘put up with’, to tolerate, but in ‘how to can, put up and preserve foods’. After consulting various dictionaries, this reviewer is none the wiser. Perhaps this is a usage familiar to the editor and to the majority of readers – but perhaps it is not. Clarification should have been sought from the author.