Old Dreams of a New Reich, the translation of Jost Hermand's comprehensive study of prefascist and fascist utopias (Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich), examines tracts and futuristic novels crucial to the development and final radicalization of German national sentiments from the second part of the eighteenth century. Scholars and propagandists used the glorified virtues of ancient German tribes to create the cult of Germanic values. These works offer a vivid insight into the public imagination between 1871 and 1945, and into the highly successful media machinations employed by the Right as it used all literary genres - including avant-gardistic works as well as pulp novels and works of science fiction - to manipulate the general public.
'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES
The hidden history of a nation sleepwalking its way into evil Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one. Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds. Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive preface by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror.
“A dense and scholarly book about . . . the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult . . . reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.”—Daily Telegraph The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire. “[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—The Washington Post “Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish.”—The Spectator “A trustworthy [book] on an extraordinary subject.”—The Times “A fascinating look at a little-understood aspect of fascism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review
Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann--a leading art historian--was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still "missing" today. Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.
Odilo Globocnik, a collaborator of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million people in three Nazi camps in occupied Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Along with Rudolf Hoss, Globocnik may be named as one of the first industrial-style killers in history. Betraying his homeland by conspiring with Hitler to destroy Austria's independence, he then launched the Generalplan-Ost, which was to expel over 100 million Slavs into Western Siberia, and played a pivotal role in Aktion Reinhardt, directing the entire program from early 1942 until September 1943, and writing letters to Himmler detailing goods looted from his victims. Globocnik's Lublin Distrikt gulag was not merely a vehicle for a well-organized pogrom; it also involved creating a highly organized network of ghettos and forced labor camps. By the winter of 1943 nearly all of the Jews of the Lublin Distrikt had been exterminated, leaving only skilled laborers used in Globocnik's industrial conglomerates. His ethnic cleansing teams, assisted by Ukrainian policing units, also cleared the Polish peasant farmers from the Zamosc Lands. Very little has been published on Globocnik, most especially the four years he spent in Lublin. This authoritative biography details every aspect of his life from his ancestry to his suicide after being captured. Information has been researched from more than thirty international archives, Globocnik's SS file, extensive interviews with his lover Irmgard Rickheim and others, a wealth of letters both personal and formal, internal memos and official reports of the SS, diaries, and the reminiscences of survivors. Includes rare photographs, many from the collection of Irmgard Rickheim.
This A–Z biographical sourcebook provides information about the life and times of Adolf Hitler, along with insight into the political movement and world conflict he created. The Hitler regime warns us of the destruction that ensues when a perverted ideology and a cult of leadership are combined with a polity where power is divorced from morality. This illustrated A–Z biographical companion provides easily accessible information about the key events in Hitler's life, his most important collaborators and opponents, his domestic and foreign policies, the use of propaganda and the forging of the Hitler cult, racial persecution and the Holocaust, and Hitler as a war leader. Adolf Hitler also includes an introduction, a chronology, maps, primary source documents, a general bibliography, and index.
In this book, Morris explores the intersection of curriculum studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalysis, using the Holocaust to raise issues of memory and representation. Arguing that memory is the larger category under which history is subsumed, she examines the ways in which the Holocaust is represented in texts written by historians and by novelists. For both, psychological transference, repression, denial, projection, and reversal contribute heavily to shaping personal memories, and may therefore determine the ways in which they construct the past. The way the Holocaust is represented in curricula is the way it is remembered. Interrogations of this memory are crucial to our understandings of who we are in today's world. The subject of this text--how this memory is represented and how the process of remembering it is taught--is thus central to education today.
