Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich

by Richard J. Evans

The fact that Rethinking Germany will force historians to reconsider their views, if not to discard them altogether, makes it a valuable addition to the literature.--The Historian
...for its many highlights and for Evans's brilliant style it should be required reading in any advanced German history course.--German Studies Review

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

An academic paper pusher doing his papers from the comfort of the tax sponsored sinecure.

Chapter one. Opening phrases:

> In the early 1970s it became clear that there were quite a number of British historians of the same generation working on various aspects of the Wilhelmine Empire. It seemed a good idea, therefore, to put ourselves on the map by bringing together all our various work in a collection of original essays.

Nice. Why did they start here? Why is it a good idea? Who cares? Get on the band wagon! Maybe another "quite a number of British historians" started some place else. How about non-British historians? Who cares! After all this shallow mind comes from a place where "quite a number" of state institutions call themselves "Her Majesty's something". So Evans might be surprised to find out there is a rest of the world.

I turn the page:

> Today, more than forty years after the fall of the Third Reich, and more than half a century after the Nazi seizure of power, [...]

It seems that the government breeds only this sort of bureaucrats. The Nazi seizure of power was less a seizure than the "natural" de Gaulle taking the rains in 1944. But this is what it is called, and Evans does not have the abilities to go up to the heights imposed by the greedy editor. "Rethinking"? With what?

I turn the page:

> More generally, West German politicians have frequently addressed historical problems in a way that is unfamiliar in other countries. In 1971, for instance, President Heinemann urged West Germans, on the centenary of the founding of the Bismarckian Reich, to see themselves as the successors not of the Empire which the ‘Iron Chancellor’ created, and those who ruled it, but of Social Democrats such as Bebel and Liebknecht, who sat in gaol as it was being proclaimed, and of the other opponents of Bismarckian authoritarianism such as Eugen Richter, the left-wing liberal, or Ludwig Windthorst, the Catholic Centre party leader during the struggles of the Kulturkampf.

What?

As written above I thought Evans lacks the brain power to do the rethinking. See how different are the Germans? Only Evans is following his agenda. He conveniently forgets stuff just to build up his story. And among so many useless words, he simply does not have the page space to tell that Heinemann Gustav was precisely coming from the Social Democrats. And that he happened to be quite religious. Now, what religion, I have no idea. Maybe he was a Muslim. So why would he want the masses to venerate a Catholic?