Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey Through the Yeltsin Era Book

In the life of every World War II buff, there comes a point where he or she must ask this question: Have I read enough books about the Nazis? Actually, with the arrogance of youth, I thought I'd never come to that point.

Let's face it, the Nazis are fascinating. There has never been, and God willing will never be again, anything like them. It's not just that they killed a lot of people because, unfortunately, genocide is nothing new to history. It's the way they did it. The concept of evil is mushy and ill-defined, but if there is such a thing as "evil," it was personified by the Nazis. They were the worst thing to ever exist in the world. Bar none. You cannot compare them to anything. They combined Germanic precision with a sociopath's mindset and a Hollywood art director's wardrobe (Come on! They wore black freaking uniforms with skulls on the collars! It would be over-the-top laughable if it weren't all true).

Upon finishing Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich, however, I started to question my appetite.

This won't be the last Nazi book I read, but I can definitely see the end. There have been thousands of books written about the Nazis, including William Shirer's famous touchstone, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. There have been cultural histories, military histories, economic histories, and biographies of just about every leading Nazi. If you're going to publish a new book, you really need to have something to offer: a fresh angle, a new interpretation, or some exceptional storytelling ability. The Coming of the Third Reich did not meet any of those criteria (which I admittedly just made up while sitting on my couch eating slices of baby Swiss cheese straight out of the packet).

The Coming of the Third Reich is the first volume in a trilogy that focuses on the rise and fall of Nazism. This opening installment begins, briefly, during the reign of Bismarck and the unification of Germany. After an equally brief survey of pre-World War I Germany, the book starts in earnest with the Treaty of Versailles and the birth of the Weimar Republic. It ends in mid-1933, after Hitler has become Chancellor of Germany and the Reichstag has burned.

It has an admirable scope, and because it is a trilogy, with room to breathe, it can discuss a lot of different things in one place. Accordingly, you get healthy discussions on Germany's various pre-Hitler anti-Weimar political parties, the role of propaganda, the dire economic situation (and its effect on the already-shaky Weimar regime), and the latent anti-Semitism endemic to Germany since time immemorial, which started to mutate after World War I.

However, it all feels done before. I'm sure there are subtle differences in scholarship, and I appreciated the modernity (Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for instance, published in the 60s, is rife with crass homophobia), but looking at the big picture, I didn't feel like this added anything new to my knowledge of the Third Reich. Moreover, Evans neatly sidesteps answering the looming questions posed by Saul Friedlander and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen regarding the birth of German anti-Semitism and the culpability of the German people. Both Friedlander and Goldhagen have wrestled with this question; Evans pretends that it doesn't exist. In this dry, sober account, nothing close to a controversial point is raised. This is quintessential just-the-facts history. And to be fair, Evans, a Cambridge professor, certainly has his facts in order, as you can see if you peruse the 70 pages of notes.

The closest Evans comes to having a twist on this story is his subtly-indicated belief that Hitler was not central to the Third Reich's arrival. Evans argues (and again, I stress subtly) that the gestational environment, political leadership, and party apparatus that pushed the Third Reich into power existed before Hitler, and might have birthed it even without his assistance (though, inarguably, in some different form). Perhaps out of some sense of decorum, Evans never comes out flat and makes this case; instead, he does it by telling the story of the Third Reich almost entirely without Hitler. It was, in a word, strange. Hitler wasn't simply diminished; rather, for hundreds of pages, he doesn't even show up.

I had two problems with this.

First, in a narrative sense, removing Hitler takes away your most interesting character. At the risk of crudely reducing the Holocaust to comparative literature, it's akin to removing Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol or Pip from Great Expectations. (On second thought, I'd have liked Pip removed from Great Expectations) By keeping Hitler at a distance, you also keep the reader at a distance, because there is no other human on which to focus. For hundreds of pages, all talk is about the abstractions of ideas and ideology. Meanwhile, all sense of the flesh and blood experience - and make no mistake, however evil he was, Hitler was human - is obliterated. Evans half-heartedly includes some diary snippets of ordinary Germans, to remind us that these events happened on earth, to real people, rather than in history books, but it isn't quite enough. It's a shame, too, because the best parts of The Coming of the Third Reich occur when Evans does attempt to follow a single person through these momentous times. I enjoyed, for instance, the story of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor who's diary reminisces on the Great Inflation were particularly illuminating. (The Great Inflation is simply mind-boggling, with people collecting their weekly salary in wheelbarrows).

The second problem is that I just don't swallow the idea that Hitler wasn't the alpha and omega of the Third Reich. Evans is correct to argue that the post-World War I Weimar regime was perfectly suited for the kind of radical movement embodied by the Third Reich. (A short list of those conditions include humiliation on the battlefield, a search for scapegoats that began and ended with Jews, crippling reparations, an ineffectual democratic government, and finally massive hyperinflation followed by the Great Depression). However, you can never convince me that anyone but Hitler could have used these events to do the same things Hitler did. In ordinary times, Hitler would have been committed by a mental health board and placed in a locked facility. In these extraordinary times, he became Chancellor of Germany. Sure, Hitler's ascension was partially a quirk of fate, but it was his particular genius that allowed him to ascend, and once he got to the top, he had definite ideas about the way things should go (in other words, I'm strongly in Ian Kershaw's "working toward the Fuhrer" camp).

My reading experience might have been salvaged by particularly graceful writing. The best I can say on that topic is that this was easier to read than Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History. Okay, that's not entirely justified. I should say that Evans is a mostly-unobtrusive writer. This is the kind of book that could've been written by anyone. Well, almost. I was annoyed with Evans' tic of interjecting clauses into every other sentence. After his 1,000th use of "indeed" to break up a sentence, I started to wonder if he had some kind of bet going with his publisher.

One's reaction to a book is quite often contextual. I realize, upon further consideration, that the biggest mark against The Coming of the Third Reich is that it's just another in a long line of Nazi books I've read. If you're coming to the subject without a lot of background, you could do worse than start and finish with Richard Evans. On the other hand, if your wife refuses to let guests into your study because your bookshelf is studded with swastika-stamped bindings, you might want to let this one pass.