Publisher's Weekly Review
How a people takes to defeat has been a staple of historical inquiry since ancient times, and in this gut-wrenching work, Cambridge University historian Stargardt (Witnesses of War) examines the German experience during WWII. His extraordinarily deep and wide research allows him to fill in an otherwise solid history of the war with intimate, newly unearthed recollections of harrowing service on the battlefield and homefront. Such is the complexity of human nature that, after millions of deaths, massive destruction, and unbelievable "psychological shock waves," Germans maintained their fierce nationalism and took pride in their ability to endure individually and collectively. What will be difficult for many readers to believe is that the people of the country responsible for the Holocaust long considered themselves the victims-of failed Nazi leadership, the Allies (whom they saw as Jews in another guise), and the Soviets. Seeing the bombing of their cities as equivalent to the death camps, and sustaining unbelievable losses on the battlefield, many Germans preferred outright destruction to a negotiated peace as in 1918. Only the next, postwar generation of Germans could get beyond disbelief and disillusionment and begin to free itself of ruinous attachments and convictions. Stargardt has produced a brilliant, sobering work. Maps & illus. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The story of World War II seen through the eyes of regular German citizens. In this massive but thorough meditation, Stargardt (European History/Magdalen Coll., Cambridge; Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis, 2005, etc.) carefully avoids fixing blame on how the war affected both the attitudes and daily lives of German citizens. Instead, the author takes a studiously clinical approach to provide a contemporary perspective on how an entire nation rose up to follow Hitler into a war of conquest and genocide. In addition to providing greatly needed context to the central problem, Stargardt also examines the long-suppressed notion that the average German citizen was under the impression that Germany was fighting "a war of national defense, forced upon them by Allied machinations and Polish aggression." Yet the author never denies that a significant majority of the population was well-aware of the atrocities being committed in their name. "Where other historians have highlighted the machinery of mass murder, and discussed why or how the Holocaust happened, I find myself more concerned with how German society received and assimilated this knowledge as accomplished fact," he writes. "How did it affect Germans to gradually realize they were fighting a genocidal war?" Stargardt covers this historic arc in deliberative detail, but he also knows when to dive down from the macro level to focus closely on soldiers, civilians, commanders, and victims. The author has clearly drawn on a wealth of letters and documents written at the time, and when he punches a specific line or memory at the right time, it's chilling. Near the end of the story, he finds eerie prescience in defeat from the late journalist Ursula von Kardorff: "And when the others [Allies] come with their boundless hatred and gruesome accusations, we will have to keep quiet because they are true." A well-researched, unsettling social history of war that will prove deeply thought-provokingeven worryingfor readers who wonder what they might have done under the same circumstances. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
WORLD WAR II was extraordinary not only for the violence the Third Reich unleashed, but also for the way Hitler's Germany went down to defeat. Kamikaze-style, suicidal defense will forever be associated with Japan. But it was Nazi Germany that actually immolated itself. While Hitler lived, there could be no negotiation. There would be no surrender, no repeat of the November 1918 armistice. The result was the devastation not only of much of Central Europe, but also of Germany itself. In the course of the war, 5.3 million men would die fighting in Wehrmacht uniform. Close to a million German civilians were killed in air raids and the ethnic cleansing that followed the war. Germany's casualties far exceeded those of all of Western Europe put together. And the violence escalated as the war went on. The largest number died in the last desperate months, the worst being January 1945, when the Wehrmacht lost 450,000 - more in a matter of weeks than America would suffer in all of its wars of the 20th century. In the aftermath, though a veil of silence descended in Germany over the Holocaust, the same was not true of the war itself. In fiction, journalism, cinema, across political and theological divides, both East and West Germany grieved for their "lost victories," the devastation of their cities and the extinction of German civilization in the east. More or less muffled debate continues down to the present day. Not having to mark the 70th anniversary this year with Putin's Russia was a source of barely concealed relief in Berlin. Compared with the abiding preoccupation of the German public, scholarly attention has been more fickle. Only since the 1990s have academic historians begun to immerse themselves in the lived experience of this vast struggle that made millions of Germans into both agents and objects of unprecedented violence. It is an uncomfortable business seeking to understand a society so full of both perpetrators and victims. One response is to follow Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in declaring Germans as a whole to have been guilty. But the panorama Nicholas Stargardt paints in his gripping new book is altogether more subtle and convincing. "The German War" takes us into the lives of men and women from all walks of life, as they fought, survived and suffered - grunts, tank commanders, staff officers; the P.O.W. camp guard who worried about corralling starving inmates into orderly soup lines and looked on unmoved as his Russian tutor was taken away to be shot; the sports-obsessed Catholic who sheltered the occasional Jew in his gymnasium; young people re-enacting pages from Ernst Jünger's memoirs of Verdun; the hard-bitten Panzer commander who was forced to concede that Germans could learn lessons in heroism from Warsaw's doomed insurgents; couples struggling to sustain unexpectedly long-distance relationships; the inconsolable spouse keeping a diary for a husband who was never to return from Stalingrad; the brazen "new woman" for whom the war offered the chance for shopping and sunbathing; the traumatized schizophrenic whose whirling delirium was made up of fragments of Goebbels's boilerplate. Stargardt, a professor of modern European history at Oxford University, puts flesh on the bones of familiar stereotypes - the "ordinary men" who found themselves knee deep in the killing fields of Poland and Ukraine, nationalist Protestants struggling to adjust their faith to the "new times," stalwart Catholics refusing to reconcile themselves to Hitler's godless regime. But this is no static inventory of social and political types. What makes this book so dramatic is that it shows us political and personal identities in motion. Perhaps the most interesting characterization of the Third Reich of late was provided by Peter Fritzsche's brilliant but creepy image of Germans "grooming" themselves into conformity with Hitler's regime. In "Life and Death in the Third Reich," Fritzsche sketched an image of a nation engaged in a collective act of "self-fashioning," driven to "live up" to the hardness, rigor and dynamism demanded by National Socialist ideals. In the same spirit, Stargardt's book captures the war as an enormously disruptive event, disturbing preconceptions, forcing Germans to square the patriotism that unified the overwhelming majority with a series of brutal emotional, political and intellectual shocks. What he shows us is the daily labor of interpretation, the work of making sense of the killing, death and destruction. Though the comparison may appear transgressive, one cannot help thinking of the vast chorus of voices that gave Saul Friedländer's history of the Holocaust, "The Years of Extermination," its devastating power. Friedländer stayed with his Jewish witnesses and victims until the last possible moment, thus bringing back the full and bewildering horror of their murder. Stargardt achieves something similar by staying with his subjects also until the bitter end. That these are both perpetrators and victims renders the effect only more unsettling. To write like this requires a rare sensitivity and psychological sophistication coupled with a degree of fearlessness. It also requires a willingness not just to indulge, but also to turn to productive use the preoccupation of educated Germans with philosophy, poetry and theology. As we listen to Stargardt's sources we are reminded that this was the age of Heidegger, Sartre and Karl Barth. Along with Nietzsche and Goethe, the imagery of the period was infused by a great revival of that most mysterious of German poets, Hölderlin, whose centenary was celebrated with pomp in 1943. Fittingly, Stargardt makes Hölderlin's runic notion of Abgrund, or abyss, into a critical leitmotif. For some of the most thoughtful contemporaries, he concludes, existential self-dramatization provided an escapist flight from immediate and personal political responsibility. But Stargardt impresses not only as a cultural historian. He also has an impressively strong grasp on the military narrative of the war. And this is indispensable. No account of German resilience can convince unless we understand both the élan of Wehrmacht offensives from 1939 to 1941 and the agonizing rear-guard action across the vastness of Ukraine and Belarus, the length of the Italian peninsula and, to the very last, in fortress cities from La Rochelle to Breslau and Berlin. As Stargardt shows, it was the identification with the fighting men, lived day by day, blow by blow through Wehrmacht bulletins and newsreels, that held the German population in suspense and kept them energized, refusing to give up hope until the very end. If one can find fault with this book, it is for sticking too closely to the new orthodoxy of the history of World War II. Stargardt's Germans fight their war strictly on an East-West axis - from the Channel coastline to the Caucasus. This focus is well justified. In Cold War histories the Eastern front was for too long shamefully neglected. But in its monolithic concentration on the "bloodlands," the new orthodoxy has resulted in a narrowly East European narrative of what was, after all, a world war. When Goebbels orchestrated his radio simulcast for Christmas 1942, the strains of "Silent Night" could be heard echoing from Lillehammer and Lapland to North Africa and Crete. Stalingrad was the eastern point of a vast continental triangle. This violent and exhilarating deprovincialization was an essential part of the German war experience. The resulting overreach would be fatal for the Axis. As many soldiers were lost in Tunisia as in the caldron of Stalingrad. Hundreds of thousands more stood guard over the fjords of Norway. But the fact that one puts down this book wanting more testifies to the lightness with which it bears its enormous weight. In revealing to us how Germans struggled to comprehend the chasm that their violence had opened up and how they understood their own perilous transition across it, Stargardt has given us a truly profound piece of history. It is an uncomfortable business seeking to understand a society of both perpetrators and victims. ADAM TOOZE, the author of "Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order," teaches history and directs the European Institute at Columbia University.
Choice Review
This book may well be the logical culmination in English of decades of attention to Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life in Nazi Germany. Historian Stargardt (Magdalen College, Oxford) deftly combines the results of extensive research in archives, diaries, letters, and other published primary and secondary sources to weave together stories from individual, local, regional, and national levels. Together they show as well as possible what it was like to be German during the Nazi era. The author presents accounts from loyal Nazis (including the leadership), other less supportive "Aryan" Germans, and outcasts such as Jews. Despite its length, the book can provide only a sweeping treatment. Among others, topics include the experiences of perpetrating racial murder and plunder, enduring Western Allied bombing and Soviet mass rape, opposing the regime as an ordinary German, fighting on front lines, queuing for rationed goods, dealing with slave laborers imported into Germany by the millions, and surviving as a Jew (the by now famous case of Victor Klemperer is retold at some length throughout). Stargardt's chronological approach and narrative skill makes his work easily accessible for students and scholars alike. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Daniel E. Rogers, University of South Alabama
Library Journal Review
What was World War II like for the Germans? Devoted complicity with the Nazi regime is typically assumed, and attempts to humanize everyday German citizens and soldiers are controversial even 70 years after the end of the war. Without that perspective, however, an understanding of the conflict is incomplete. In his latest work, Stargardt (Witnesses of War) continues his exploration of German lives during that grim time. While this account is important, it doesn't always make for easy reading as we are confronted with stories from men and women suffering the effects of war on their daily lives. These anecdotes are culled from letters, diaries, and archives, among other sources. From our postwar viewpoint, their experiences may come across as tragic and even ironic, since readers know what they don't-when and how the war ended. VERDICT Stargardt provides a vital and necessary addition to the World War II canon that will appeal to World War II buffs and anyone with an interest in 20th-century German history.-Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
