Life and Death in the Third Reich (review)

In this extremely nuanced and rich account of the Third Reich, Peter Fritzsche explores why individuals were pulled toward Nazism and how they accommodated themselves to its values. Synthesizing much of the current literature on the subject as well as offering powerful examples from letters and diaries (in particular Victor Klemperer, who is, perhaps, a bit overused), Fritzsche offers a fresh interpretation of how Nazism infiltrated the everyday lives of ordinary Germans.

In his earlier book Germans into Nazis, Fritzsche explained how the tumultuous years after World War I laid the groundwork for a movement which advocated for German unity and offered the hope of recapturing the common cause that many people had felt at the outbreak of the conflict. This book is essentially the sequel to that study, carrying forward Fritzsche's examination of the process by which Germans evolved toward a general, widespread acceptance of most Nazi principles. Germans—rather quickly, Fritzsche notes—rationalized their growing belief in (or at least tolerance of) Nazism because it offered improvements in their daily lives which helped to erase the bitter memory of defeat, and it activated the powerful sense of participation in a renewed community.

Fritzsche is particularly interested in the active and self-conscious choices people made to accede to Nazism, and in doing so he both explores and complicates the line between "German" and "Nazi." Looking at how Nazism was built from the ground up, Fritzsche argues that he hopes "to examine how Germans in this period struggled with the Nazi revolution in various keys of desire, fascination, and dismay" (pp. 7–8). Indeed it was a struggle, and Frit-zsche is attuned to the unevenness with which Germans embraced Nazi goals and the varying reasons which individuals had for being pulled, sometimes haphazardly, toward Nazism or pushing back against it. The process of "becoming" a Nazi was highly individual and refracted through a range of experiences. However, as Fritzsche puts it, "This struggle is what Germans came to share in the Third Reich," and it bound them together in a sense of community which Nazism coordinated and channeled (p. 8).

The Nazis framed that struggle in the starkest terms of "life and death," arguing that only they could reinvigorate Germany in the wake of World War I and the Weimar Republic. The urgency that dichotomy implied helped nudge Germans along the road to Nazism because it posited that the alternative was nothing less than extinction. To "regenerate national life in Germany," the Nazis ironically needed to "annihilate life" that threatened it (p. 5). Violence became a spectacle which allowed individuals to visualize unity and identity. Against this backdrop, Germans were able to see their movement toward Nazism as a "moral" choice in which the good was bounded by the notion of racial and national survival.

Yet that black-and-white world that the Nazis painted for Germans played out in a variety of mundane ways throughout much of their reign. For instance, Fritzsche describes how the "Heil Hitler!" greeting became a subtle way to enforce conformity within the nation. Although one could not be sure that an individual German meant the phrase, and more traditional greetings remained in widespread use, to hear and say those words on a day-to-day basis created the "appearance of unanimity, which overwhelmed nonbelievers and prompted them to scrutinize their own reservations" (p. 24). As individuals accepted such small acts of cooperation with the Nazis, larger acts would become easier.

World War II, of course, became the moment in which the Nazi premise of "life and death" was fully realized and enacted, especially on the brutal eastern front. The war created the ultimate national community, essentially playing World War I in reverse according to Fritzsche. Germans believed they were undoing the devastation wrought upon them by Versailles, but only by eliminating their enemies in a war of complete and utter destruction. Death was elevated to the level of cleansing purge...