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  • Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim
  • Bruce F. Pauley
Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim, Andrew Stuart Bergerson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 312 pp., $35.00.

Despite books such as William Sheridan Allen's classic The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town and Ian Kershaw's Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945, we still know far more about macro-politics in Germany during the 1930s than we do about developments at the local level. Andrew Stuart Bergerson tries to fill in some of this gap, intending [End Page 510] Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times to "serve as both a classic history of the Nazi revolution as well as a cultural history of everyday life." The author hopes that his volume will appeal "to both popular and academic readers; to German historians and Holocaust scholars" (Preface). Unfortunately both subtitle and preface promise more than the book delivers.

Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times bears the markings of an only slightly revised doctoral dissertation. Far from providing the reader with a rich background of political events against which to judge everyday events—the author promises to do this in a later book—Ordinary Germans discusses very mundane phenomena such as flag displays on private homes, street salutations, the wearing (or not wearing) of hats, where people took their walks, and what kind of charitable donations they made. The author's thesis is that Hildesheimers proactively, or at least inadvertently, aided the Nazi revolution by accepting the use of "Heil Hitler!" as a greeting, by the display of the swastika flag, and by contributing to the Nazi charity Winterhilfe. Simply by walking on the opposite side of a street in order to avoid the Nazi salute, some people voluntarily isolated themselves from the rest of the population—and thus in some cases abetted their own eventual demise. Such new Nazi habits thus integrated most Hildesheimers into a new totalitarian society, breaking down the old social order while alienating and isolating Jews and German opponents of the Nazis. "New manners," Bergerson asserts, "not only legitimized a regime but also drove the revolution forward" (p. 253). Ironically, the general acceptance of Nazi habits proceeded without overt coercion on the part of the Nazis. These are interesting and useful generalizations, although it is difficult to see why they required 279 pages of text (including the appendix) and five pages of explanatory notes.

The author chose Hildesheim—in the 1930s a town of 50,000 to 60,000 people in northwestern Germany—for his study because it reflected the political, economic, and social conditions of Germany as a whole. It had a small but important community of Jewish businessmen, included both Protestants and Catholics, employed a work force of both white- and blue-collar workers, and voted in only slightly smaller percentages for the Nazi Party than did Germany as a whole. The narrative relies on two hundred hours of taped interviews carried out in the early 1990s with thirty-six Hildesheimers (some then living abroad) born between 1899 and 1930. The author admits that the passage of time and the pressures of political correctness may have colored some of his subjects' reminiscences.

In addition to the interviews, Professor Bergerson has made use of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, the Bistumsarchiv and Stadtarchiv in Hildesheim, and an abundance of secondary sources listed in nineteen pages of bibliography. The book is also enriched by twenty-one photographs, mostly of people and street scenes and taken between 1919 and 1942. Two tables show the class structure and employment of Hildesheimers during the inter-war period, and two others show the age and gender distribution of the interviewees. Scholars will appreciate the six-page name and [End Page 511] subject index, but probably will be irritated by the fact that references related to secondary sources (included in the text rather than footnotes) lack page citations. The appendix includes an interesting historiography; ironically, it is perhaps the most interesting part of the book, and its contents might have been more useful in the introduction.

Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times is thoroughly...

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