Woodruff D. Smith

This is a heavy historical analysis which tracks the development of two imperalistic German ideological trends - labelled Weltpolitik and Lebensraum - from the end of Bismarck's rule to the Nazis. It's hard to imagine a more complete study of this subject, but you really need to be very very interested in old imperial ideas to read the entire book. I found the German imperialisms of the 19th century to be so unrealistic and out of touch with reality that there was no way I could garner enough interest to bear with the author as he studies the slightly different versions that one writer after another presented in their writings.

The story gets more interesting when the author gets to World War I where the imperialistic ideologies and their assumptions of automatic German superiority had to some extent be re-evaluated. The discussion of ideological developments in the Weimar republic was also reasonably interesting, although again the author goes into quite a lot of detail when presenting individual ideologues and their writings. Then finally come the Nazis. The author actually treats Nazi imperialism surprisingly briefly given the title of this book, but that's a good thing. No useful purpose would have been served by detailing Hitler's or Rosenberg's versions of Weltpolitik and Lebensraum - they would be familiar to most readers. The story of this book is that they built their ideology on a pre-existing tradition.

In summary, this is a high-quality historical book but I am a bit doubtful as to whether or not it is well-suited for educated non-specialists. Most ideologies are just castles in the sky, and as such they are not a very interesting topic for detailed study unless and until somebody tried to put them into practice.… (altro)