Book Recommendation on Class Analysis of Nazi Germany

by DReicht

I'm interested in examining Nazi Germany from a class perspective but a quick look through google has failed to give me any book length works on the topic. Any recommendations?

kieslowskifan

Part of the problem with your google search might be that "class" is often a highly nebulous term and despite its importance to social historians, it is often highly difficult to nail down.

Most of the works using a socioeconomic lens to examine the Third Reich deal primarily with the issue of the Nazi seizure of power and trying to examine what electoral group bears responsibility for voting for the Nazis. older historiography emphasized that Nazism was a largely middle-class movement, but recent scholarship has qualified this assessment. Both Conan Fischer's The Rise of the Nazis and The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933 by Thomas Childers assert that while the lower middle-class was one of the stablest of the Nazi's constituency, they managed to branch out into other groups. Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann's Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in 'red' Saxony largely examines the small but significant inroads the NSDAP made among Saxony's proletariat, which many prior scholars had assumed were immune to the appeal of the NSDAP. Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933 by Pamela E. Swett is an excellent readable urban study of how violence ensconced itself into Berlin's working class culture and neighborhoods.

For the period 1933-39, a good survey is Richard Evans's The Third Reich in Power, which covers more than just class but is a good grounding for understanding this period. lthough it's both old and a biography, Ronald Smelser's Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader is a good window into both the promise and the shortcomings of the German Labor Front, which the Third Reich intended to be the worker's voice in the new order it was creating. Historians are also increasingly turning less to class as a category or statement of identity and instead examining how class was experienced by people, particularly with their consumption of material goods. Two of the books that typifies this new approach to class is Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich by Shelley Baranowski and Nazi 'Chic'?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich by Irene Gunther. Both historians examine how the Third Reich tried to have its cake and eat it too; it pursued a consumer strategy that promised the good life for all Germans, but then had to both make the dream possible and define it in such a way that it would distinguish itself from both American-style mass consumption and older middle-class patterns of consumerism.

Obviously, this is just scratching the surface of a vast historiography upon the Third Reich and I don't doubt that others on here can weigh in with suggestions.

Rittermeister

If you've already read it, ignore me, but Evans's Third Reich trilogy is a very good, comprehensive work on the political, economic, and ideological state of things during the Nazi period.

Bigglesworth_

Richard Grunberger's A Social History of the Third Reich is pretty comprehensive, with sections on the family, party, civil service etc.

slcrook

Both /u/kieslowskifan and /u/Rittermeister make excellent suggestions.Mine would be a little closer to source. It may be rambling, at times incoherent and vainly self-serving (which, when you think about the man's megalomania, it makes sense his writing would be such) but as a study of social divisions in the proposed National Socialist Germany, Hitler's Mein Kampf (if it is available where you live) would be a good foundation for your analysis.