UBC: Unanswered Questions
Jan. 5th, 2009 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI am puzzled, and a little disturbed, to realize that I haven't been blogging my reading about the Nazis, aside from Hitler's Willing Executioners and The Wilkomirski Affair. It's not like this weird swerve in my reading habits is a secret, and it's not that the reading hasn't been thought provoking. I just don't know.
In any event, I'm not going to retroactively blog this stack of books, but here are some things I've been reading:
Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. [Biography of Himmler. iirc, this book is the source of my tag nazis: evil *and* crazy, because I kept reading about the things Himmler believed and having to put the book down and shake my head to make my brain realign.]
Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. [Hitler und die Endlösung: "Es ist des Führers Wunsch", 1982] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. [Painstaking and exhaustive refutation of David Irving's thesis in Hitler's War that the Final Solution was all Himmler's doing]
Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS. [Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, 1966.] Transl. Richard Barry. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Nicholas, Lynn H. Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. [This book is very good at explaining why the Jews "didn't just leave." They couldn't--because other countries would not let them in.]
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999. [This is an excellently readable book, not about explaining Hitler, but about the efforts to explain Hitler.]
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1990. [The eyewitness glimpses of Hitler are utterly creepifying.]
Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2007. [Weirdly riveting economic history of Nazi Germany.]
Trevor-Roper, H. R. The Last Days of Hitler. 1947. New York: Collier Books, n.d. [Hitler. Also crazy as well as evil.]
And today's UBC:
Furet, Francçois, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989.
These essays vary widely in quality. Some--Yehuda Bauer's "Jewish Resistance and Passivity in the Face of the Holocaust," for example--are excellent; others are mediocre. Several suffer from bad editing or bad translating or bad writing--it can be hard to tell which. The most interesting/useful insight (for me) came from Shulamit Volkov, "The Written Matter and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism," with the remark that "Nazism was a spoken culture" (UQ 52). Because that's not only true, but it explains so much about how Nazism--and Hitler--worked.
In any event, I'm not going to retroactively blog this stack of books, but here are some things I've been reading:
Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. [Biography of Himmler. iirc, this book is the source of my tag nazis: evil *and* crazy, because I kept reading about the things Himmler believed and having to put the book down and shake my head to make my brain realign.]
Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. [Hitler und die Endlösung: "Es ist des Führers Wunsch", 1982] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. [Painstaking and exhaustive refutation of David Irving's thesis in Hitler's War that the Final Solution was all Himmler's doing]
Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS. [Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, 1966.] Transl. Richard Barry. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Nicholas, Lynn H. Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. [This book is very good at explaining why the Jews "didn't just leave." They couldn't--because other countries would not let them in.]
Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. 1998. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999. [This is an excellently readable book, not about explaining Hitler, but about the efforts to explain Hitler.]
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1990. [The eyewitness glimpses of Hitler are utterly creepifying.]
Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2007. [Weirdly riveting economic history of Nazi Germany.]
Trevor-Roper, H. R. The Last Days of Hitler. 1947. New York: Collier Books, n.d. [Hitler. Also crazy as well as evil.]
And today's UBC:
Furet, Francçois, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989.
These essays vary widely in quality. Some--Yehuda Bauer's "Jewish Resistance and Passivity in the Face of the Holocaust," for example--are excellent; others are mediocre. Several suffer from bad editing or bad translating or bad writing--it can be hard to tell which. The most interesting/useful insight (for me) came from Shulamit Volkov, "The Written Matter and the Spoken Word: On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism," with the remark that "Nazism was a spoken culture" (UQ 52). Because that's not only true, but it explains so much about how Nazism--and Hitler--worked.
