In this compelling and ambitious study, Peter Fritzsche analyzes the dramatic transformation of bourgeois politics before the Nazi breakthrough in 1930. Examining the local texture of civic life--market square protests, small town patriotism, and social clubs--as well as political parties and interest groups, Fritzsche provides a crucial perspective for understanding the fate of the Weimar republic, one which has been largely neglected by German historians. Even before the Great Depression the traditional bourgeois parties were eclipsed by a new breed of populist politicians who not only resisted the left but also embraced public activism and attacked big business, German conservatism, and the Weimar state itself. It was this populist sentiment to which the Nazis appealed with such consummate skill, not so much seizing power as assuming the ambitions and prejudices of middle class voters while transcending the limitations of the political organizations.

Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany

History

Fritzsche, Peter

Americas

Oxford University Press

The story of how Germans came to embrace the Third Reich.\nGermany in early 1933 was a country ravaged by years of economic depression and increasingly polarized between the extremes of left and right. Over the spring of that year, Germany was transformed from a republic, albeit a seriously faltering one, into a one-party dictatorship.\nIn Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche examines the pivotal moments during this fateful period in which the Nazis apparently won over the majority of Germans to join them in their project to construct the Third Reich. Fritzsche scrutinizes the events of the period - the elections and mass arrests, the bonfires and gunfire, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts - to understand both the terrifying power that the National Socialists came to exert over ordinary Germans and the powerful appeal of the new era that they promised.

Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

OUP Oxford

German philosopher and self-proclaimed nihilist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche stands out as a furious, explosive thinker who repeatedly pulled apart the certainties of the nineteenth century and whose writings attract, astonish, and unsettle readers to this day. This volume offers a selection of Nietzsche's writings, all newly translated by the author, that facilitate an understanding and discussion of his philosophies, style, and influence. In an engaging and accessible introduction, Peter Fritzsche familiarizes students with elements key to Nietzsche's thought and his extraordinary intellectual and political influence: his condemnation of the nineteenth century as degenerate and uncreative; his rejection of Christianity, democracy, and socialism; his belief that all cultures are founded on lies and illusions; and his conviction that individuals should seek to overcome convention and morality in order to create themselves as supermen. Document headnotes give students background and guidance in reading Nietzsche's writings, and a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography provide additional pedagogical support.

Nietzsche and the Death of God: Selected Writings (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

Bedford/St.Martin's

A vivid account of German-occupied Europe during World War II that reveals civilians' struggle to understand the terrifying chaos of war In An Iron Wind, prize-winning historian Peter Fritzsche draws diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to show how civilians in occupied Europe tried to make sense of World War II. As the Third Reich targeted Europe's Jews for deportation and death, confusion and mistrust reigned. What were Hitler's aims? Did Germany's rapid early victories mark the start of an enduring new era? Was collaboration or resistance the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where was God? People desperately tried to understand the horrors around them, but the stories they told themselves often justified a selfish indifference to their neighbors' fates. Piecing together the broken words of the war's witnesses and victims, Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the most violent conflict in modern history.

An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler

Europe

Basic Books

In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how they took possession of a past thought to be slipping away, and how they generated countless stories about the sorrowful, eventful paths they chose to follow. 
 In the aftermath of the French Revolution, contemporaries saw themselves as occupants of an utterly new period. Increasingly disconnected from an irretrievable past, worried about an unknown and dangerous future, they described themselves as indisputably modern. To be cast in the new time of the nineteenth century was to recognize the weird shapes of historical change, to see landscapes scattered with ruins, and to mourn the remains of a bygone era. 
 Tracing the scars of history, writers and painters, revolutionaries and exiles, soldiers and widows, and ordinary home dwellers took a passionate, even flamboyant, interest in the past. They argued politics, wrote diaries, devoured memoirs, and collected antiques, all the time charting their private paths against the tremors of public life. These nostalgic histories take place on battlefields trampled by Napoleon, along bucolic English hedges, against the fairytale silhouettes of the Grimms' beloved Germany, and in the newly constructed parlors of America's western territories. 
 This eloquent book takes a surprising, completely original look at the modern age: our possessions, our heritage, and our newly considered selves.

Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

Harvard University Press

What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies. An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition. Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies. (20080621)

Life and Death in the Third Reich

Belknap Press

On January 30, 1933, hearing about the celebrations for Hitler’s assumption of power, Erich Ebermayer remarked bitterly in his diary, “We are the losers, definitely the losers.” Learning of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which made Jews non-citizens, he raged, “hate is sown a million-fold.” Yet in March 1938, he wept for joy at the Anschluss with Austria: “Not to want it just because it has been achieved by Hitler would be folly.” 
In a masterful work, Peter Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft―a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. The goal was to create a new national and racial self-consciousness among Germans. For Germany to live, others―especially Jews―had to die. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life. Fritzsche examines the efforts of Germans to adjust to new racial identities, to believe in the necessity of war, to accept the dynamic of unconditional destruction―in short, to become Nazis.
Powerful and provocative, Life and Death in the Third Reich is a chilling portrait of how ideology takes hold.

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

In this inventive book, Peter Fritzsche explores how Europeans and Americans saw themselves in the drama of history, how they took possession of a past thought to be slipping away, and how they generated countless stories about the sorrowful, eventful paths they chose to follow. 
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, contemporaries saw themselves as occupants of an utterly new period. Increasingly disconnected from an irretrievable past, worried about an unknown and dangerous future, they described themselves as indisputably modern. To be cast in the new time of the nineteenth century was to recognize the weird shapes of historical change, to see landscapes scattered with ruins, and to mourn the remains of a bygone era. 
Tracing the scars of history, writers and painters, revolutionaries and exiles, soldiers and widows, and ordinary home dwellers took a passionate, even flamboyant, interest in the past. They argued politics, wrote diaries, devoured memoirs, and collected antiques, all the time charting their private paths against the tremors of public life. These nostalgic histories take place on battlefields trampled by Napoleon, along bucolic English hedges, against the fairytale silhouettes of the Grimms' beloved Germany, and in the newly constructed parlors of America's western territories. 
This eloquent book takes a surprising, completely original look at the modern age: our possessions, our heritage, and our newly considered selves.

Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment in Rote Insel, Berlin's famous working-class district. What makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one of the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom of twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll’s voice from his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest of an ordinary citizen to make sense of a violent and bewildering century.
 Peter Fritzsche paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly seventy years as history thundered around him. Determined to compose a “symphony” from the music of everyday life, Göll wrote of hungry winters during World War I, the bombing of Berlin, the rape of his neighbors by Russian soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S. superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries, Göll grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and later he struggled to engage with the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably modern society.
 With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man's thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the collective experience of twentieth-century life, registering its manifold shocks and rendering them legible.

The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

Historical

Why did ordinary Germans vote for Hitler? In this dramatically plotted book, organized around crucial turning points in 1914, 1918, and 1933, Peter Fritzsche explains why the Nazis were so popular and what was behind the political choice made by the German people. 
 Rejecting the view that Germans voted for the Nazis simply because they hated the Jews, or had been humiliated in World War I, or had been ruined by the Great Depression, Fritzsche makes the controversial argument that Nazism was part of a larger process of democratization and political invigoration that began with the outbreak of World War I. 
 The twenty-year period beginning in 1914 was characterized by the steady advance of a broad populist revolution that was animated by war, drew strength from the Revolution of 1918, menaced the Weimar Republic, and finally culminated in the rise of the Nazis. Better than anyone else, the Nazis twisted together ideas from the political Left and Right, crossing nationalism with social reform, anti-Semitism with democracy, fear of the future with hope for a new beginning. This radical rebelliousness destroyed old authoritarian structures as much as it attacked liberal principles. 
 The outcome of this dramatic social revolution was a surprisingly popular regime that drew on public support to realize its horrible racial goals. Within a generation, Germans had grown increasingly self-reliant and sovereign, while intensely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They had recast the nation, but put it on the road to war and genocide.

Germans into Nazis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fritzsche, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fritzsche, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fritzsche, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany

Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich

Nietzsche and the Death of God: Selected Writings (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler

Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

Life and Death in the Third Reich

Life and Death in the Third Reich

Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

Germans into Nazis