Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People: The Rise of Fascism Seen Through the Eyes of Everyday People

Product Information

Anii au trecut, Germania a reușit să se stabilizeze și la putere venise partidul naționalist-socialist, cu Hitler în frunte. Străinii nu mai veneau doar ca să vadă o țară bucolică, ci și pentru studii și mediul cultural. Însă totul era înșelător, iluzia s-a spart destul de repede odată cu Anchluss, anexarea Austriei. Cu toate astea, oamenii si-ai văzut mai departe de viețile și concediile lor. Liniște a fost și la anexarea Cehoslovaciei. Abia în Noaptea de Cristal, când sunetul vitrinelor sparte, a strigătelor de spaimă și durere, când persecuția evreilor a devenit evidentă, când nu se mai puteau închide ochii la uciderea acestora, la existența lagărelor în care erau închiși, abia atunci situația reală a început să devină zgomotoasă. A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism, 2022. Cowritten with Angelika Patel. They were master propagandists. Hitler understood completely the power of theatre: the weekly rallies, the speeches, the marching songs, the torchlight processions and, importantly I think, the semi-erotic power of all those alpha males in beautifully designed uniforms. Let us not be naïve about any of this. Travellers in the Third Reich is a chronological overview of the history of the Third Reich, supplemented with the accounts of a wide variety of foreign visitors (mostly from the UK and the US). The book doesn’t put forward any grand conclusions. Rather, it offers a new perspective on Germany during this time and a glimpse into the political attitudes around the world. Subtitle of the book could be a bit misleading. It promises to show us Hitler's Germany "through the eyes everyday people" but it turns out the majority of those eyes belong to the European nobility, high diplomats, industrialists and artists most of whom were mere passers-by rather than local observers. So the most of what they reported were shallow observations based on what the Nazis wanted to project to the tourists.

Julia Boyd has written what has to be one of the most fascinating books of the using new material for private collections and archives around the world. She also asks the poignant question of without the benefit of hindsight, how do you interpret what’s right in front of your eyes? Clearly not an easy question to answer, but one Julia Boyd sets out to do with Travellers in the Third Reich. But the writing is well on the wall by then. The Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, then teaching at Frankfurt University, notes the “demagogic violence” of the articles being published in Germany and “their determination to chase the opposition and beat them down to the very last resort, even to their deepest inner life”. Soon, the curtain will rise on the Second World War. The most harrowing chapter is a case study of a young man blind from birth who was one of the victims of the "euthanasia" programme which was designed to get rid of the disabled, seen by the Nazis as a burden and a blot on the perfect master race. I had read about this programme before, in the context of its being the forerunner of the Final Solution, whereby the Nazis practiced the methods they eventually used on the Jews, and other "racial undesirables" such as Gypsies. The book possibly does fall down in not making that connection especially as the chapter on how village Jews were affected doesn't convey the full horror - some were helped to commit suicide before deportation, some managed to leave the country, and some were hidden, or shielded by the mayor, a "good Nazi". As far as I recall, only a couple of people were actually deported to camps and they managed to survive and return to the village after the war. The Jews always formed a tiny minority in the village so that part of the book isn't really representative of a lot of other, often more urban, communities. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.Fascinating … This absorbing and beautifully organised book is full of small encounters that jolt the reader into a historical past that seems still very near." There are also the wonderful descriptions of some of the adventures and encounter some of the travellers had, and as Boyd note “There was no question that Berlin offered its visitors – especially the Anglo-Saxons – sexual and intellectual adventures unobtainable in their own countries”. It must also be remembered that Rupert Brooke wrote Grantchester in Berlin at this time. What was Nazi Germany really like in the run up to the Second World War? Julia Boyd’s painstakingly researched and deeply nuanced book shows how this troubled country appeared to travellers of the 1930s who did not have the benefit of hindsight. A truly fascinating read” -- Keith Lowe, Sunday Times bestselling author of Savage Continent and Inferno Imaginează-ți că mergi în Germania în anii '30 ai secolului trecut. În scop turistic doar, o călătorie pentru propria relaxare, pentru peisaje, pentru cultură, oameni și așa mai departe, adică toate motivele pentru care mergi în vacanță. Și acolo, în timp ce îți savurezi binemeritatul concediu, începi să vezi - sau să auzi - diferite lucruri nelalocul lor: o ură irațională împotriva evreilor, cărți arse în public, un stat militarizat cu un conducător oarecum carismatic pentru publicul larg, care vedea în el un salvator al națiunii. Sigur, ai putea să vezi toate astea, o parte din ele sau pur și simplu să nu sesizezi nimic. Ce ai face, ce ai zice? Ce aș face eu, mă întreb, în asemenea cazuri? Mi-aș vedea mai departe de vacanță dacă aș fi observat lucrurile cu claritatea pe care o avem acum? Greu de răspuns pentru o situație ipotetică. Și sigur că nu putem compara ce era atunci cu prezentul și informațiile pe care le avem acum. Dar dacă? Cât de mult ne pasă de nivelul economic și traiul oamenilor din țările pe care le vizităm? Totuși cred că ajung prea departe cu speculațiile... The book in general was below my expectations but its accessible, non-academic prose reads like a novel with some interesting characters and anecdotes. I recommend two better books if you really want to have an idea about how it was like to live in the Third Reich:

Many of the children are shown to have been indoctrinated into total belief and a lots of Obersdorf residents are killed during WW2 fighting with the Mountain Division or in the death camps.The book has a wide range of viewpoints; academics, oversea students, members of the British aristocracy, diplomats, journalists, politicians, and ordinary travellers, are all represented. There are those who, like Unity Mitford, staked out Hitler and infiltrated his inner circle out of fanaticism, through Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who were unimpressed, to those who immediately spotted the danger of the emerging National Socialist Party and those who, without the benefit of hindsight, were unquestioning and uncritical - even when visiting book burnings and labour camps. Persuasive propaganda and the distortion of truth, or simple politeness, led to some visitors remaining uncritical of a country not their own. For the most part I found this an interesting read. The book is well-researched and delves into many aspects of life during the Third Reich, showing how the government pervaded every part of one’s daily activities. I liked that the chapters were organized thematically rather than chronologically, which made it easier to follow. Oberstdorf is a beautiful village high up in the Bavarian Alps, a place where for hundreds of years ordinary people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. Yet even here, in the farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics 4 stars The British government was warned of the Nazi threat by its professional diplomats but had plenty of German sympathizers in its own ranks, and was terrified of provoking another war, so they failed to create a unified diplomatic front with France. Hitler got his way again and again until he was convinced the West was so weak and degenerate it would never challenge him. England did not even act when Hitler himself gave clear indications of his intentions. “On 7 April [1933] Hitler told McDonald in a private interview, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’” (p. 104)

Session expired

Congratulations to Julia Boyd whose Travellers in the Third Reich has been short listed in the history section for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Once the book enters the Hitler years, there is nothing to complain about. It documents, with various nuances, how National Socialism (Nazism), the purported antidote to communism, ends up becoming a poison that cannot be distinguished in its effects from Stalinism: “Many foreigners wondered how it was possible that two such violently opposed political movements could share so much common ground.” The rise of Hitler starts slowly and innocuously, with most of the middle class essentially looking away and many foreign dignitaries, especially from England and the US, essentially hoping that the rougher edges of Nazism would be smoothened with power and experience. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this interesting study is just how difficult it is for any individual to discern what is going on without the perspective that hindsight offers.