The Nazi Revolution: Hitler's Dictatorship and the German Nation… (utgåvan 1990)

This is an update of the first version of The Nazi Revolution, originally edited by John Snell. It is meant for undergraduates (and maybe some more interdisciplinary type graduate students) to familiarize them with historiography of Nazi Germany. At least as it existed until the mid to late 1990s. As such, it is a serviceable volume, divided into sections on political history, economic history, sociology, and even psychology. The elements of "psychohistory" are the least valuable. Still, not a bad place for students to start on this subject, especially after they have familiarized themselves with the factual timeline and biographical details of the main participants under study. ( )

The 1973 edition of Snell's Nazi Revolution, which I read first as an undergraduate soon after it was published, still has relevance. Although several editions have followed, the Allan Mitchell editions of the 1990s, the original remains important to me. It is a snapshot of the state of the scholarship on Nazi Germany at the time it was published. And the reader can see how the field of study has changed so remarkably since the 1950s-1970s. Neither Gerhard Ritter, the one time dean of German historians, or A.J.P. Taylor appear in the Mitchell editions. And the focus of study turned from the development of nationalism and new technologies to Mitchell's centering on what might be termed more Marxist related topics, social class, institutions, and economics. I also think that television and film during the 1970s-1990s served to change the focus of study. Quite clearly, what was important to historians in the immediate postwar generation--the containment of German nationalism and militarism--changed to a "lesson for us all" approach during the 1990s and since then. Nazi Germany, as a field of study, devolved into a template to apply to contemporary politics and society. Historians were becoming "relevant," instead of historically centered. And from the 1990s, the change has become even more marked, with gender theories, critical race studies, and socio-psychological guilt treatises becoming the norm. In effect, Nazi history has become de-contextualized.

This is the real value of these Heath series from the past. Concise examples of what were the issues important to historians of certain eras. ( )