Nazi Germany: A New History. - book reviews

By Klaus P Fischer Continuum, 734 pp., $37.50.

THIS EXCELLENT BOOK is the first single-volume history of Nazi Germany since William L. Shirer's magisterial 1959 study, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Klaus Fischer has put to good use the intervening decades of scholarship on Hitler's Germany. What his book lacks in immediacy and drama it more than makes up in depth and discerning appraisal.

The differences between Shirer's and Fischer's lives suggest the divergence in their perspectives. Shirer was an American journalist and Berlin correspondent who had witnessed and reported on the Nazi takeover. Born in Munich in 1942, Fischer is a child of the Third Reich, the son of parents who served in the military during World War II (his mother in the German navy, his father as a surgeon in the German army). At the age of 17 he emigrated to the U.S. and is now a historian at Allan Hancock College in California.

Fischer's book is less the comprehensive "new history" its subtitle proclaims than a summary and interpretation--including occasional explicit position-taking--of the vast specialized scholarship on the Hitler regime. But this does not lessen the book's value, since Fischer synthesizes brilliantly His dispassion and balance make especially valuable his concluding chapter, "The Question of German Guilt." Here Fischer admirably avoids what he terms the two extremes of "racialist Germanophobia and apologetic revisionism" of much Third Reich scholarship.

Fischer crafts a coherent, richly textured narrative out of an extraordinarily diverse welter of events and personalities. He possesses the storyteller's eye for arresting detail. For example, he opens his third chapter, "The Rise of Adolf Hitler," with a little-remembered incident: the razing in 1939 of the hamlet of Dollersheim, home of Hitler's ancestors. The village was turned over to the German army for military maneuvers, an event that symbolizes Hitler's nihilistic drive to recast himself by obliterating his past.

Fischer does not hesitate to take positions. Siding with some recent demographic studies of the Third Reich, he dismisses claims that the lower-middle class chiefly supported Hitler and argues instead that Hitler's highest level of support came from the upper and upper-middle classes. "The more affluent, the greater the likelihood of Nazi support." Probably the most provocative stand that Fischer takes is in his highly speculative treatment of Hitler's psychopathology. He diagnoses Hitler as a sociopath who probably also suffered from multiple-personality disorder.

Even more controversial is Fischer's pyschobiographical approach to the Holocaust. Drawing on the research of Rudolf Binion, Fischer suggests that the Holocaust was Hitler's delayed, delusional response to his own temporary blinding by a mustard gas attack in 1918. Hitler's mother had been treated unsuccessfully by a Jewish physician on her deathbed in 1907. Lying in his hospital bed in 1918, suggests Fischer, Hitler subconsciously "may well have blamed [the doctor] for torturing and killing his mother." Hitler's "hallucinated mandate" was to avenge both his mother's and Germany's honor: he had been gassed in World War I; in World War II it would be the Jews' turn.

Such interpretations risk crossing the line from history to pop psychology. But Fischer argues persuasively that a study of Hitler's psychopathology is necessary, both because much of the Nazi movement would otherwise be incomprehensible and because the Fuhrer's authoritarian personality had a direct bearing on Nazi policy.

COPYRIGHT 1996 The Christian Century Foundation
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