Life and Death in a German Town: Osnabrück from the Weimar Republic to World War II and Beyond (review)

The study of Nazi Germany has, since the 1960s, benefitted from a series of effective local studies.¹ Micro-history elucidates the processes of change and individuals’ roles therein. More than most regimes, the Third Reich sought to be present in citizens’ daily lives yet relied upon local institutions to carry out much of its policy. In such a context local history especially reveals the ways in which Germans experienced and took part in the dramatic events of the 1930s and 1940s.

Panikos Panayi has produced rich and valuable local study of these years. The book does not break new thematic ground, but its detailed analysis of the northwestern city of Osnabrück offers three unique perspectives: it describes the experiences of various ethnic groups, it treats the years from 1929 to 1949 as a distinct period, and it mines well the methodology of Alltagsgeshichte or “the history of everyday life.” Panayi’s general argument – that almost all groups in Osnabrück experienced hardship during some or all of the era from 1929 to 1949 – is therefore less important than his approach.

An introductory section compares national developments over these two decades to events in Osnabrück and traces the origins of Germany’s economic and political crisis that began in 1929. Panayi takes great pains to explain the ways in which this city of nearly 100,000 represented well events in Germany writ large. Even unique features of Osnabrück, such as the presence of an antisemitic party independent from the Nazis or the fairly even confessional division in a town with an Archbishop seat, serve to explain larger conflicts and developments. Here and throughout the book Panayi employs archival, published, and oral history sources. This breadth of material makes individuals’ experiences and recollections integral parts of the narrative.

Section II on ethnic majorities takes apart the three epochs after the Nazis came to power: the peacetime years (1933–39), the Second World War, and the postwar years of 1945 to 1949. Panayi details the experiences of many Germans during these years: women, political enemies, children, professionals, Nazi leaders, and industrial workers, among others. Identities rooted in daily activities shaped the ways Osnabrückers came to terms with the Third Reich and its aftermath. For instance, neither Catholics nor Protestants challenged the state’s racialist ideology. But greater Roman Catholic resistance to the regime’s attempt to mold daily life created “the main alternative to Hitler loyalty.” (88)

The chapter on World War II demonstrates why Panayi dedicates the book to victims of Nazism and of Allied bombing. Everyone living in Osnabrück experienced traumatic change during the war years, even ethnic majorities not persecuted by the Third Reich. The Allied bombings in particular have prompted vigorous debate recently about German victimhood in the midst of the Third Reich’s perpetration of genocide.² Panayi uses social and individual histories to illustrate the bombings’ lasting impact on German society. A chapter on life after the war describes the grueling difficulties survivors faced to reach the “happy ending” of West Germany’s “economic miracle” beginning in the 1950s. Panayi occasionally misses the forest for the trees in this chapter. For instance, he offers fine detail on the process of economic and social reconstruction but says little about the larger function of material want in the developing Cold War struggle.

Part III depicts the experiences of ethnic minorities, specifically Jews, Romanies, and foreign workers over this same period. Here we especially see the strength of a local study. Panayi’s analysis of everyone living in Osnabrück during this period traces the roots of ethnic tension, describes the impact of Nazi policy, explicates the execution of the Holocaust, and confronts the experience of Osnabrück’s only real period of multiculturalism during the war. This interaction fleshes out what...