Introduction

The papers in this feature derive from a workshop in honour of the historian Tim Mason, held in Oxford in December 2010.¹ Tim Mason, who published his first essay, a brilliant critique of A. J. P. Taylor's account of the origins of the Second World War, in 1964, was a pioneer of the social history of Nazi Germany. He was also an active participant in the History Workshops of the late 1960s and 1970s which gave rise to History Workshop Journal. His death in 1990 at the early age of fifty not only deprived the Journal of an impassioned and much-loved colleague, but also robbed the field of German history of one of its most original and pungent voices.²

The workshop was organized to mark the twentieth anniversary of Tim's death, and was held at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he had been a student and then research fellow between 1962 and 1971. Under the title 'Politics, Economy and Class in National Socialist Germany: a Reassessment', we looked at the ways in which the historiography of Nazi Germany and fascism had changed since 1990 - not least through the relative eclipse of these terms themselves. This triad of terms had provided the framework for the pathbreaking research of the two decades following the opening-up of the German archives in the 1960s - research which not only expanded our understanding of the political and social dynamics of Nazi Germany, but also generated debates of fundamental significance about the character of National Socialism and fascism, and their relationship to modernity and to capitalism. Class in particular, which had been a contested but inescapable term for historians between the 1960s and 1980s, and for some a master-concept, had receded as a primary category of explanation and object of study, and historians of Nazi Germany, as in other fields, were beginning to explore new concepts and categories: among them race, biopolitics, violence and generations. These expanded both the research agenda and findings, but also left the older debates half-visible, a shadowy but unresolved background.

Mason's own studies of the working class under Nazism had in many ways been dedicated to uncovering the hidden class struggles through which he believed German workers fought against Hitler and his regime, in myriad informal acts of everyday and unorganized resistance - the only means possible under the heavy and intrusive police regime of the Third Reich. His method and approach were basically those of everyday-life history (Alltagsgeschichte), but unlike other pioneers of the genre such as Martin Broszat and his research group in Munich, Tim's focus was relentlessly on the world of work, a focus that also reflected his commitment to Marxist methodology in a period when this was one of the acknowledged tools of the historian's trade.

Still, the workshop was not intended to be a nostalgic exercise in revisiting abandoned historiographical terrains (although a certain quotient of generational remembering could not be banished from our discussions). It aimed to map out new departures in the history of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy by means largely of research papers rather than historiographical surveys. Each panel took one of Mason's major projects as its starting-point (labour and social policy; Hitler and regime dynamics; race and class; women and gender; war, economy and plunder; and a final roundtable on comparative fascism), and brought together representatives of different historical generations in order to throw differences of approach into relief.

Two of the four essays in the feature deal with race and gender; two with Italian and German society in the world war. Running through the essays by Eve Rosenhaft and Jane Caplan is a common hunch: that something is to be gained by examining the administrative and legal practice of gender and race from its margins. A black man is tried for rape in the middle of a war, when Polish forced labourers were being routinely lynched for engaging in consensual sex with German women. A German Sinti is harrassed and loses his vital job, because 'gypsies' are deemed to be hereditarily 'workshy' and 'asocial', and...