Nicholas Stargardt - The German War: a nation under arms, 1939-1945

More Advance Praise for

The German War

Little by little, with a raft of new insights, and a clear and empathetic eye, Nicholas Stargardts remarkable new book transforms our view of something we thought we already understood: the German populations evolving attitudes during the war. For the first time, the wartime chronology of German sentiment, of popular hopes and fears, realism and fantasy, becomes truly visible. A powerful and compelling account.Mark Roseman, Professor of History, Indiana University

Why did most Germans, reluctant to enter a second world war in 1939, ultimately unify behind an effort that by 1943 seemed doomed to failure? Weaving together first-person testimonies drawn from diaries, memoirs and letters, Nicholas Stargardt provides insightful, illuminating, complex and convincing answers in this big book. Seven decades and a mountain of monographs later, I wouldnt have thought thered be much more to say about WWII. Stargardt has proven me wrong.Robert Moeller, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

Forcing reflection on many different levels, Nicholas Stargardts book pierces through the tangles of both propaganda and moralism to offer a searching and compulsively readable account of a conflict that was understood from within as a German, not just a Nazi, war. Stargardt negotiates the considerable risks of writing from inside German experiences of this brutally destructive war with subtlety, humanity and wisdom. This is a rich and deeply impressive lesson in ethical understanding without sacrifice of historical distance or critical judgment.Jane Caplan, Emeritus Fellow, St Antonys College, Oxford

The German War is a tour de force of historical learning, breadth of vision, and narrative skill. In depicting the intricate back and forth between the big violence of the conduct of the war and the impossible complexities inside individual storiesbetween the challenges facing ordinary lives and the relentlessness of a wartime beyond their controlNicholas Stargardt brings an acuteness of insight and sureness of touch to an extraordinary wealth of material. A truly epic account.Geoff Eley, Professor of History and German Studies, University of Michigan

Nicholas Stargardt spotlights the surprising twists and turns in the popular embrace of both the war and Nazi racial extremism. He explainsas few havewhy the German people fought to the finish, whereas even the supposedly fanatical Japanese surrendered before an invasion of the homeland.Sheldon Garon, author of Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life

THE GERMAN WAR

Copyright 2015 by Nicholas Stargardt

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015945013

ISBN: 978-0-465-07397-9 (EB)

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by The Bodley Head

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Contents

This book completes a period of just over twenty years in which I have tried to understand the experience of those who lived in Germany and under German occupation during the Second World War. It is also a book I did not originally intend to write. In 2005, I promised myself and anyone else who would listen that having just completed Witnesses of War: Childrens Lives under the Nazis, I would not be writing anything more on children, the Holocaust or Nazi Germany. This book began as a short essay about what Germans were fighting for, as something that I felt needed to be said before I could move on, and started to take shape as something far bigger during a sabbatical year spent at the Free University in Berlin in 20067.

There are some clear continuities between the two books, most obviously my interest in exploring the subjective dimensions of social history, using the contemporary record to work out how people judged and understood events while they were unfolding around them and before they knew the eventual outcome. There are also some clear differences. In Witnesses of War, I wanted above all to treat children as social actors in their own right; I also set out to juxtapose the irreconcilable perspectives of children divided by war and racist persecution into victors and vanquished. The German War presents a different problem: how to uncover the fears and hopes of the society from which the victors and perpetrators came in order to understand how Germans justified this war to themselves. To focus on this question I have tried to develop both a sense of breadth and of depth: breadth by using macro snapshots of opinion, drawing on what eavesdropping reporters for the regime picked up from public conversations or military censors from sampling the mail bags; depth by following a select cast of individuals, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, over a considerable period of time, exploring how their personal hopes and plans were entwined with their changing experience of the war. Doing this has made the voices of the victims less prominent than in Witnesses of War but they are never absent: without their contrasting perspective, we would not know how differently and often solipsistically Germans framed their understanding of the war.

One of the key ingredients of this book are the collections of letters between lovers, close friends, parents and children, and married couples. Many historians have used these kinds of sources, but often to different effect. For example, the Bibliothek fr Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart has a famous collection of some 25,000 letters assembled by Reinhold Sterz. Unfortunately, the letters were catalogued by time and not by author, so that they provide a snap-shot of subjective opinions at particular moments of the war, without it being possible to test how firmly the letter writers held these opinions over any length of time. What guided my selection was the opposite principle: I wanted to read collections of letters in which both sides of the correspondence are preserved and which continued for several years at least, so that it would be possible to see how the personal relationships between the correspondents their principal purpose in writing at all developed and altered over the course of the war. This allows us to reconstruct more carefully the private prisms through which individuals viewed major events. It is the kind of research which historians of the First World War have been developing since the 1990s and I have learned a great deal from Christa Hmmerle about how to do this.