Life and Death in the Third Reich. By Peter Fritzsche. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2008. Pp. 368. Cloth $27.95. ISBN 978-0-674-02793-0.

摘要

The central questions of Peter Fritzsche’s new book, Life and Death in the ThirdnReich, have long bedeviled historians of the Third Reich. To what extent didnGermans imbibe Nazi ideology? To what degree did they identify with andnparticipate in the Nazi regime’s hideous racial order? In his compelling study,nFritzsche begins provocatively by agreeing with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s con-ntroversial thesis that Germans shared an “eliminationist” anti-Semitism withnNazi leaders. Yet Fritzsche seeks not merely to “make the case that morenGermans were Nazis and Germans more National Socialist than was previouslynthought” (p. 7). Rather, he sees the nazification of Germans as a process bynwhich Germans “struggled with the Nazi revolution in various keys of desire,nfascination, and dismay” (pp. 7–8). If Germans grappled with the morality ofnNazi anti-Jewish policies, euthanasia, and the conduct of the war, the regimenwon them over with myriad opportunities to “become” a “Volk comrade.” Innso doing, the Third Reich enabled Germans to identify with the “collectivenfate and collective trials of the nation” (p. 11), and follow the Nazi regime tonthe bitter end.