Visions of Community in Nazi Germany

Reviews / Votes

The volume impresses with its high degree of coherence and shows the productivity of a many-faceted analysis of 'Volksgemeinschaft', inspired by cultural history approaches, for the social history of the Nazi regime. Above all, this is due to the introduction which stresses the 'making' of the 'Volksgemeinschaft'. By doing this it brings together hitherto opposed interpretations and opens the perspective for social practices in a fluid "new frame of reference" in which ideas about individuality and normality were fundamentally connected with exclusion and violence. * Lu Seegers, Sepunkte * The volume's strength certainly lies in the felicitous connection of a theoretical conceptualization and historiographical integration of the "Volksgemeinschaft" approach with source-based case studies. * Nils Loeffelbein, Neue Politische Literatur * The "new frame of reference" gives this volume remarkable coherence, wherefore it can claim its rightful place in the currently controversial debates about the Nazi 'Volksgemeinschaft.' * Adelheid von Saldern, Historische Zeitschrift * Steber and Gotto have brought together a team of esteemed scholars, and most contributions are of high quality. What these make clear above all, it that historians and other researchers should take the concept of Volksgemeinschaft seriously when studying Nazi Germany and the policy of the National Socialists. The vision of 'the people's community' was not just propaganda: it steered policy. * Martijn Lak, European History Quarterly * The most innovative contributions show that the community-building potential of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' discourse was founded on its pertinence for action: It offered an action-oriented worldview which provided even those, that remained in ideological distance to the Nazi regime, with a number of options, and thus functionally stabilized the system by practical action. * Wolfram Pyta, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung * This is a highly impressive volume that makes a powerful case for taking the Volksgemeinschaft paradigm seriously ... as a document of a debate that has been highly productive in many ways, this volume is clearly destined to become a canonical text in the historiography of the Third Reich. * Neil Gregor, Central European History *