I am particularly interested in political history and historiography and want to use that as a topic for my extension history major work. I was trying to find arguments regarding the inevitability of the rise of Nazism in Germany but arguments against that weren't enough to be sustained throughout the essay - any tips or book recs?
Thanks !
u/abrytan answers a question on the sonderweg thesis, here. It should help get you started.
It sounds like you're mainly interested in what's known as the Sonderweg question, which was a debate over whether Germany took a "special path" that led to Nazism and couldn't have been repeated in another country. As far as book recommendations, I would say the starting point is David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley's The Peculiarities of German History, which was where my historiography classes in grad school started the discussion of the Sonderweg question. Hans-Ulrich Wehler's The German Empire 1871-1918, Ian Kershaw's The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, A. J. P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War, and Detlev Peukert's The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity are required reading as well, and I'll always recommend Kershaw's Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich on the subject of the Machtergreifung.
I will warn you that it's easy to get very, very into the weeds with the historiographic debates regarding this period, especially when you get into the Historikerstreit in the 1980s (the "historians' conflict" between conservative and leftist historians over the issue of whether the Holocaust is unique and Germany bears a unique historical guilt or not), which is important for understanding the modern interpretations of the Nazi era in Germany but also gets pretty arcane pretty quickly and will likely go well beyond what you can use (and manage) for an undergrad history paper. Most of the works in question were written in German, which you may or may not read, and some of them weren't translated into English. If so, the key players included Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, and Andreas Hillgruber on the right and Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Martin Broszat on the left, and their works would be a good starting point. If you don't read German, Richard Evans wrote a useful summary of the debate called In Hitler's Shadow.
You can also go down the functionalism-intentionalism rabbit hole if you want, which is another central question of historiography and probably one of the first things you'd cover in a graduate-level German historiography course. This is probably past the point that you'll want to go, since it's mainly concerned with the Holocaust rather than the Machtergreifung, but it does include the debate over when (and whether) Hitler developed a plan for the extermination of the Jews, with the more extreme intentionalist arguments (which, I should add, are no longer taken very seriously) claiming that Hitler did have a plan to exterminate the Jews as far back as when he was writing Mein Kampf (a dubious argument that's generally been rejected by current scholarship, but part of an important historiographic question nonetheless). Usually when you learn this subject in grad school, the two books used to present the functionalism-intentionalism question are generally Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (a functionalist work that remains well-respected) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (an intentionalist work that was controversial at the time and is almost universally rejected now). The actual starting points for the debate were Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (the seminal functionalist work) and Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews (the seminal intentionalist book). Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is another important work to consider in this area but is almost certainly outside the scope of your interests; The Origins of Totalitarianism might be more relevant for your purposes (although it precedes the Sonderweg debate and generally isn't seen as part of that question).
As you can see, most of these debates took place and were resolved in the 1980s and 1990s, and aren't really sources of active contention anymore, at least not in terms of the major battles; the debates have moved on to smaller questions within these larger issues. I don't mean to suggest that these questions are considered totally solved or that the era of high-level historiographic debate on Nazi Germany is over, just that a point of relative consensus has been reached on these major questions. There will always be room for reassessment and reinterpretation that will lead to new debates; I mean people are still arguing about ancient Rome for God's sake, so of course there will be plenty of future arguments about something that happened less than 100 years ago.
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