Hildesheim is a mid-sized provincial town in northwest Germany. Ordinary
Germans in Extraordinary Times is a carefully drawn account of how townspeople went
about their lives and reacted to events during the Nazi era. Andrew Stuart Bergerson
argues that ordinary Germans did in fact make Germany and Europe more fascist, more
racist, and more modern during the 1930s, but they disguised their involvement
behind a pre-existing veil of normalcy.
Bergerson details a way
of being, believing, and behaving by which "ordinary Germans" imagined
their powerlessness and absence of responsibility even as they collaborated in the
Nazi revolution. He builds his story on research that includes anecdotes of everyday
life collected systematically from newspapers, literature, photography, personal
documents, public records, and especially extensive interviews with a representative
sample of residents born between 1900 and 1930.
The book
considers the actual customs and experiences of friendship and neighborliness in a
German town before, during, and after the Third Reich. By analyzing the customs of
conviviality in interwar Hildesheim, and the culture of normalcy these customs
invoked, Bergerson aims to help us better understand how ordinary Germans
transformed "neighbors" into "Jews" or
"Aryans."