Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich.

• Author: Green, Harold M.
• Position: Book Review

Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. xxxiv + 622 pp. Cloth, 34.95.

At first glance it would seem difficult to fathom the rise of Nazism in a country that was long the source of formidable humanistic scholarship and scientific achievements. How is it possible that the country of Goethe, Kant, and Helmholtz could become one where a demonic Austrian malcontent was able to mesmerize millions of people and ultimately lead Germany to ruin? Yet on further analysis, one can discern disturbing antiintellectual currents in the ebb and flux of German history long before its unification in 1871 which provoked harsh criticism and dire predictions. Indeed, as early as 1817 a leading German conservative, Karl Adolf Menzel, in despair over the anti-Western and anti-Enlightenment German worldview, wrote: "This hostile fury to which you strive in the midst of peace to excite the hearts of youth against a whole people (the French), those truly cannibalistic war songs you make the young sing[:] ... all this is not Christian and German but pagan" (Hans Kohn, German History, 1954, p. 18). In a more prophetic vein, the great romantic poet Heinrich Heine declared (in 1836, as cited in Frederick L. Schumann, The Nazi Dictatorship, 1936, p. 473), "There will be played in Germany a drama compared to which the French Revolution will be only an innocent idyll." It remained for the historian Jakob Burckhardt to give form and substance eleven years later to Heine's prediction. In a letter (cited in Albert Salomon, The Tyranny of Progress, 1955, p. 7), Burckhardt described with frightening accuracy the essence of the Nazi dictatorship when he wrote, "This despotic regime will not be practiced any longer by dynasties.... The new tyrannies will be in the hands of military commandos.... Then the laws will be changed and I can guarantee the Semite gentlemen that their time is past."

Many studies have viewed the rise of Nazism as the culmination of an inevitable process rooted in many years of German history dating back to the time of Martin Luther. Most notable in this regard are William McGovern's From Luther to Hitler (1941) and Jean Spenle's German Thought from Luther to Nietzsehe (1942). In The Coming of the Third Reich, written for the general reader in the tradition of William L. Shirer's classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), Richard J. Evans shifts the point of departure for an analysis of the German tragedy to...