WITH THE CENTENARY OF THE Weimar Republic’s founding just gone, and that of Hitler’s rise to power fast approaching, interest in modern German history is as strong as ever. New books about Nazism and World War II still adorn the shelves of most bookstores, while documentaries and historical dramas about the period are watched by millions.
The reasons for this are many. The Third Reich has long occupied an outsized space in our historical memory, but war in Eastern Europe has raised the spectre of another, wider conflict — a Third World War — just as democratic backsliding and populism’s growing appeal have us wondering if we, too, are going the way of the Weimar Republic. The present has us again looking at the past, in other words, to find out if we’ve learned anything at all from it.
But shouldn’t the recent spate of books about Weimar and Nazi Germany also book about Nazism?”
