Immagine dell'autore.

Mary Fulbrook

Autore di A Concise History of Germany

28+ opere 1,074 membri 14 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Mary Fulbrook, FBA is Professor of German History at University College London (UCL), UK. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard Universities, she is the author or editor of numerous books, including Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, for which she won the 2019 Wolfson mostra altro History Prize, and A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, winner of the 2012 Fraenkel Prize. Professor Fulbrook has served as Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, Academic Director of the UCL European Institute, founding Joint Editor of the journal German History, and Chair of the German History Society. mostra meno

Comprende il nome: Fulbrook Mary

Opere di Mary Fulbrook

Europe Since 1945 (2001) 36 copie
German History since 1800 (1997) 23 copie

Opere correlate

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Nome canonico
Fulbrook, Mary
Nome legale
Fulbrook, Mary Jean Alexandra
Data di nascita
1951-11-28
Sesso
female
Nazionalità
UK

Utenti

Recensioni

In 1939 three Harvard professors – Gordon Allport, a psychologist; Sydney B. Fay, a historian; and Edward Y. Hartshorne, a sociologist – ran an essay competition with the title ‘My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933’. With a first prize of $500 – a substantial sum at the time – the competition attracted more than 250 entries. They were written between late summer 1939 and spring 1940, more than two-thirds of them by émigrés to the US, and most in German. The majority were written by Jews but there were also some submitted by people whom the Nazis called ‘Mischlinge’ (‘mixed breed’) and some by ‘Aryans’, most of whom opposed the regime. On the basis of this trove of sources, Mary Fulbrook sets out to bring some nuance to the concept of the ‘bystander’ as it is usually applied to members of German society under the Nazi regime: people who were neither ‘perpetrators’ nor ‘victims’.

Fulbrook leaves the reader in no doubt as to her position: that the concept of the ‘bystander’ is helpful neither for understanding the ways in which people’s behaviour shifts over time, nor for ascertaining degrees of conformity, complicity and collaboration. Nazi Germany, she writes, ‘was not intrinsically a “perpetrator society”, but over time it became a society in which widespread conformity produced growing complicity in establishing the preconditions for genocide’. The result, she concludes, was a society in which ‘most people would either not want, or not dare, to intervene on behalf of victims, and in which most people learned to look away’.

In recent decades, a historiography that stressed the Nazi regime’s enforcement of terror has given way to the notion of a ‘consensus dictatorship’. In other words, the Nazi regime enjoyed considerable popular support even if it could not create the ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) of which the leading Nazis dreamed. Peter Fritzsche, for example, has written about the German people ‘racially grooming’ themselves, and scholars such as Robert Gellately and Thomas Kühne have argued that support for the Nazis rapidly outstripped the need for terror to back up the regime. Fulbrook rightly observes that this interpretive change echoes a generational shift: those who were young during the Third Reich (and who gave oral history interviews in the late 20th and early 21st centuries) were less likely to offer fear as a reason for their conformity.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
HistoryToday | Jan 5, 2024 |
Jag har letat länge efter en bra bok om Tysklands historia, men det här var inte den.
 
Segnalato
pelo75 | 6 altre recensioni | Jan 21, 2023 |
On the one hand, I’m not a specialist, so I can’t evaluate Mary’s work technically. On the other hand, she seems to emote sanely, (by no means a universal trait among historians), so, there’s that.

I guess I sorta agree with the balanced view of East Germany. First, it was not a second German totalitarian state—no racist war, no genocide, despite the presence of a normatively speaking unlawful repression of some people some of the time. (I mean, the Stasi was bad, don’t get me wrong, but too much paranoia: COVID restrictions in 2020 were the second Nazi dictatorship, maybe the second Holocaust—here we go! Where it stops, nobody knows!) But second, it was a dictatorship, albeit a non-totalitarian one, that favored some and repressed others, and could not in the end pay its bills. East Germany was not a happy place. In the first years, paranoid socialists scowling at the people who had grinned at the death camps, and the last few years, the economy fell apart.

Part of the reason that I decided to get this book is that it’s a girl’s take on general history, white man’s history, which in this case paid off I think, because the 49th percentile man’s man historian is usually pretty—To war! Down with the capitalists! They rob us! And down with the socialists! They take our freedom! Fight, fight—fight on! —Which especially in the non-apocalypse scenario isn’t that helpful much of the time. (I do say the 49th percentile, and not everyone all the time.) And it’s also non-Nazi German history, general German history, which despite the endless demonic appeal of Hitler is nice. The demons don’t bring home all the bacon, just most of the animal-product bacon, lol.

…. It kinda comes across as sorta similar to the West, but a sort of knock-off version. They had similar problems—they had an unkind class system, youth/elder conflict, and the steely gaze of bureaucrats, but less money for everything. No genocidal war, but, you know.

—I think that the most important thing is not to have a leader named Hitler.
—That’s right! Everybody wins! *confetti or whatever and lights and carnival sounds* Everybody wins in the future, and the future is now!

But, you know. Gotta allocate resources. ^^

…. Of course, I don’t really know how I’d do it myself, if I could read German and all the rest of it, but I see a caution—I mean, there is a reason, because I wouldn’t normally see lying down in front of the tanks or (indeed) cracking heads to be positive engagement with society, but since there’s this Cold War paranoia about everything for some people, then you end up stressing the soul in the street, you know…. who just wants to get wasted and not take sides! (Everyone blames it on the outside agitators, but it’s everywhere the same, there’s no Ground Zero of drunkenness in world history.) It’s better to be engaged, to engage positively, to, in a way, take a side…. as poorly as speakers act, you know, when they feel entitled (in one way or another) to an audience. (Epictetus: Do philosophers issue invitations to a lecture, as though they were having a party? [No!].)

…. The thought hadn’t really occurred to me before, that a society could become less grounded or whatever in disputes about class, economic class, because of ‘atomisation’. It could, though, couldn’t it. You’re not ‘working class’, if it’s just you and the dog, and you growl at anyone who gets close enough to ask about meetings, let alone ‘unions’, lol! Interesting word! —No, I don’t want to unify with you! Rover! Rover! —K, Bye! (crazy old man).

…. And, yes, there was fear and control in East Germany; I wouldn’t make excuses for them, in that sense, like, for Anna Conformist it was swell!, you know, although it’s not a competition, right—Because they lived in Forbiddenland, I don’t know. Things were forbidden, and they were Them, and That is forbidden! lol. [Lol they hate their people and we hate their people.]

But either way you look at it there are a lot of societies that don’t want you to know what goes on in their prisons, you know.

…. What a boring place Germany can be. You forget, and yet it’s so obvious.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
goosecap | Sep 8, 2022 |
It's certainly concise. I picked this one up after a trip to Germany where I realized I was seeing several historical monuments that referenced events that I had literally zero context for. While I wouldn't say I'm an expert after reading this, I at least better understand why there are so many random castles.
 
Segnalato
Jthierer | 6 altre recensioni | Jan 2, 2020 |

Premi e riconoscimenti

Potrebbero anche piacerti

Autori correlati

Statistiche

Opere
28
Opere correlate
1
Utenti
1,074
Popolarità
#23,944
Voto
½ 3.6
Recensioni
14
ISBN
103
Lingue
11

Grafici & Tabelle