Originally published in 1971. Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic examines reparations in Germany following the First World War. Financial reparation was the most difficult and dangerous of the conditions imposed upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty. The amount of reparations - three times the country's annual income - was beyond Germany's capacity to pay. The United States, by insisting on the payment of Allied war debts, forced the Allies in turn to insist on reparations. Postwar polemics concentrated on German aggression and war crimes, but the real issue was the damage done to the world's economic mechanism. In the end all nations suffered, including the United States.
This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) tells of a man who—both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish—rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position of foreign minister in the early days of the Weimar Republic. His achievement was unprecedented—no Jew in Germany had ever attained such high political rank. But Rathenau's success was marked by tragedy: within months he was assassinated by right-wing extremists seeking to destroy the newly formed Republic. Drawing on Rathenau's papers and on a depth of knowledge of both modern German and German-Jewish history, Shulamit Volkov creates a finely drawn portrait of this complex man who struggled with his Jewish identity yet treasured his “otherness.” Volkov also places Rathenau in the dual context of Imperial and Weimar Germany and of Berlin's financial and intellectual elite. Above all, she illuminates the complex social and psychological milieu of German Jewry in the period before Hitler's rise to power.
Since the beginning of the current era of imperialism in the late nineteenth century, there has been a striking contrast between bourgeois political thought in Germany and the West. Walter Struve demonstrates how German political culture went through a phase in which great emphasis was placed on the establishment of a new political elite recruited on the basis of merit and skill, but ruling in an authoritarian way, and not controlled by the populace. He suggests that this type of elitism, many aspects of which were vital to the political culture of Nazi Germany, seems today to be widespread in the West. The development of this concept of an open-yet-authoritarian elite is approached through the analysis of the political ideas and activities of nine elitists, among them Max Weber, Walther Rathenau, and Oswald Spengler. The author relates biography to intellectual, political, social, and economic history, so that his work becomes a study in the political and social context of intellectual history. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
About half of Kolb's compact book is devoted to a "Historical Survey," chronologically divided at the conventional watersheds of 1923-24 and 1929-30. A briefer second part, a historiographical essay in seven topical chapters, is followed by a seven-page chronology, a 676-item classified and topical bibliography, and an index. The bibliography, updated to February 1987, includes some English-language titles not in the original German edition, and is a list of tremendous value. Frequent references to individual entries (as well as to some works not found there) tie the bibliography to the historiographical essay, which is characterized by fair and judicious appraisal of interpretations of the period, even when Kolb clearly disagrees. There is a chapter on the revolution of 1918 and its aftermath in the first section, and one on art and mass culture in the second; each section of the survey also has one chapter focusing on foreign policy, and one on domestic developments.
Defying Hitler was written in 1939 and focuses on the year 1933, when, as Hitler assumed power, its author was a 25-year-old German law student, in training to join the German courts as a junior administrator. His book tries to answer two questions people have been asking since the end of World War II: “How were the Nazis possible?” and “Why did no one stop them?” Sebastian Haffner’s vivid first-person account, written in real time and only much later discovered by his son, makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible. “An astonishing memoir... [a] masterpiece.” — Gabriel Schoenfeld, The New York Times Book Review “A short, stabbing, brilliant book... It is important, first, as evidence of what one intelligent German knew in the 1930s about the unspeakable nature of Nazism, at a time when the overwhelming majority of his countrymen claim to have know nothing at all. And, second, for its rare capacity to reawaken anger about those who made the Nazis possible.” — Max Hastings, The Sunday Telegraph “Defying Hitler communicates one of the most profound and absolute feelings of exile that any writer has gotten between covers.” — Charles Taylor, Salon “Sebastian Haffner was Germany’s political conscience, but it is only now that we can read how he experienced the Nazi terror himself — that is a memoir of frightening relevance today.” — Heinrich Jaenicke, Stern “The prophetic insights of a fairly young man... help us understand the plight, as Haffner refers to it, of the non-Nazi German.” — The Denver Post “Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler is a most brilliant and imaginative book — one of the most important books we have ever published.” — Lord Weidenfeld
Originally published in 1981 and now re-issued with a new Preface, this book contains contributions on key issues such as the origins of the First World War, the psychological impact of that war on the Germans, the enigmatic personality of Walter Rathenau, anti-semitism and paramilitarism, as well as German Ostpolitik during the Weimar period. The collapse of the Weimar Republic is re-examined and this is followed by an analysis of the social basis of the SS leadership corps, German reactions to the defeat in 1945 as observed by the British authorities and finally a wide-ranging comparatiste essay on why Germany did not experience a 20th century revolution in spite of the tremendous upheavals it suffered.
