Abstract
Alan Steinweis’ The People's Dictatorship is hardly the first student-facing generalist work on the Third Reich to be published in recent times, but it is destined to rank as one of the best. This is not only because of its crisp, state-of-the-art content. It also provides some of the clearest explanations on offer of key interpretations developed from 1945 onwards. ‘Corporatism’, ‘People's Community’, ‘Total War’, the ‘normative’ versus the ‘prerogative state’, and other essential terms are all outlined in an expert and remarkably persuasive manner. The author's argument that ‘German society under Nazi rule … was never static, but always in the process of becoming’ is wonderfully phrased and informs the book's approach from start to end (3).
The ‘People's Dictatorship’ concept is also Steinweis’ own and is intended to ‘capture the paradox of a repressive authoritarian regime with significant public support’ (2). It signals both a bold rejection of ‘totalitarian’ theories and a subtle refinement (albeit basically an endorsement) of Robert Gellately's idea of the Third Reich as a dictatorship built on ‘consensus’ (see Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford 2001)). It also accounts for the varying degrees of accommodation to National Socialist rule by ordinary Germans, and the ‘rising confidence in the future’ by 1939 (106). Attitudes ranged from enthusiastic support for individual policies, especially in the economic sphere, to fatalistic acceptance that a dictatorship existed and nothing could be done to oppose it.
Steinweis balances this with reference to acts of non-conformity, including widespread absenteeism on the factory floor and in the Hitler Youth. He does not mention what was probably the regime's biggest propaganda failure, however, namely its inability to persuade racially ‘desirable’ families, and particular women, to have more children, ending in an average of less than two per marriage by 1940.
More directly, Steinweis re-centres the role of ‘physical violence and the threat to employ it’ in upholding the regime, especially in its earliest months and in its dying phase from July 1944 (55). ‘Voluntary self-coordination’, he argues, is an inadequate phrase to describe the ‘countless’ acts of ‘raw … intimidation’ that took place across the country in spring 1933 in response to the slightest hint of opposition to the new political order (69). In relation to this there are some excellent passages on the emergency ordinances of 4 and 28 February 1933, the latter also known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. Steinweis is right to emphasize the vital role both played in the workings of the ‘prerogative state’, with longer lasting effects even than the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933. Meanwhile, antisemitic measures such as ‘the purge of Jews from the professions and the Aryanization of Jewish-owned property’ were not just imposed top-down but were popular and won the regime ‘broad legitimacy across classes’ (98).
Overall Steinweis’ coverage is both broad and to the point, which is exactly what one is looking for in a book of this type. However, I have a few small niggles. The notion that political parties in Germany prior to 1933 lacked ‘the traditions of compromise required for building majorities or hammering out governing coalitions’ needs to be nuanced in the light of recent research on Weimar's rather more robust parliamentary culture (25). Likewise, the claim that the far right ‘mobilized disgruntled war veterans’ after 1919 should be balanced against the findings of Benjamin Ziemann and others that significant numbers of republican ex-servicemen actively campaigned against ultra-nationalist and militarist ideas (29). The contention that the ‘“People's Radio” … vastly extend[ed] the range of Hitler's speeches and other regime-produced propaganda’ is overplayed (87). In fact, as Kate Lacey showed in the 1990s, only 3.5 million of these devices had been sold by 1939 in a population of by then just under 80 million, and the Nazi leader's rantings, while effective during open-air rallies, were far less suited to being broadcast into private residences (see Lacey, ‘Driving the Message Home: Nazi Propaganda in the Private Sphere’, in Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey, eds, Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London 1996), 189–210, here 192, 194–5).
A more striking weakness lies in Steinweis’ reluctance to pay much attention to historiography. For instance, he claims that his ‘analysis of the political and constitutional weaknesses of the Weimar Republic draws to a significant degree from 1960s-era scholarship’, but he does not explain why this decade produced insights that have stood the test of time (1). His occasional nods to the work of Karl Dietrich Bracher in the early post-war years or to the ‘voluntarist turn’ (Neil Gregor) of the 1990s are welcome, but he offers little on developments during the late Cold War period, such as the ‘historians’ quarrel’ of the 1980s or German reunification in 1989–1990. And beyond the world of academic controversy, it would also have been good to know more about ‘what Nazism … meant to [successive generations of] Germans’ after 1945, and what it means to them today (6).
Part of the reason Steinweis does not address these issues relates to his belief that ‘[t]o understand Nazism as an historical phenomenon, we must isolate it from the mythologies, pop-cultural memes, and presentist political usages that often dominate popular perceptions of the subject’ (8). Yet as important as it is not to distort the realities of the past by subordinating them to current concerns, Steinweis’ anti-presentist agenda can also be taken too far. If Bracher ‘characterized Nazism as (among other things) “a revolt against liberal democracy”’ (19), then this necessarily has a different meaning and significance for scholars and students in the early 2020s than it did for Bracher's readers in the 1950s and 60s. All history, ultimately, is historiography.
However, these are bigger points about the purpose of scholarly writing (and synthesis) and should not detract from the positive achievements of the book. In terms of his chief remit, namely to ‘demythologize’ the Third Reich and make it comprehensible to students of today (5–6), it delivers and does so with sparkle and energy.