I love historiography and I'd love to know what the different views on this particular topic are among historians and maybe get some reading suggestions along those lines?
I've always been fascinated by the question. The Nazi ideology seemed to me to contain this contradiction; caught between a desire to revolutionise German society and radically transform it, while glorying in notions of traditionalism and the "historical character" of the nation at the same time.
What's the generally accepted, mainstream view among historians these days? Where is the historiographical debate at this point? I'm vaguely aware that Marxist historians view Nazism as a deeply reactionary and bourgeois ideology, but I'd guess this argument is much less prominent in the discourse these days?
I'm not sure I would generalize for all historians, but the phrase I like to borrow on this comes from Jeffrey Herf, who in his book of the same name describes National Socialism as reactionary modernism. Which is to say, it's a blend, but it's a very specific blend: it's a combination of the "low" end of a reactionary philosophy (the embrace of the idea of the Volk, the enshrining of the idea of the common agricultural German as the core of German society and culture, the rejection of the overly cosmopolitan, overly Jewish Zivilization of Weimar, Enlightenment values) and the "high" end of modernist philosophy (the embrace of high technology, the embrace of scientific racism and eugenics, the active desire to mold German Blut and use it as an agent of change in the world).
Herf's approach isn't perfect, but I find it more useful than trying to fit the Nazis into one category or the other. They saw themselves as "reactionary revolutionaries" of a sort — truly a "revolution," and one that moved "forward," but that "forward" embraced much of the "backwards" as well.
Anyway, if you are interested in these questions, Herf's book is, at the very least, a necessarily book to add to the pile: Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary modernism: technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984).