An American historian explores the interplay of culture and
politics that favored the rise of Hitler in the city he transformed
into the headquarters of the Nazi movement. Large (History/Montana
State Univ.), author of five previous books about modern German
history and editor of another two, is one of the figures helping to
reestablish narrative history as an intellectually respectable
genre. His new book tells the story of Munich as the scene of
Nazism's birth and rise. When Hitler - who had failed to establish
himself as an artist in Vienna - arrived in Munich in 1913, the
city had a reputation for bohemian and avant-garde culture, which
accommodated Hitler's image of himself as a rebel. But he also
thought of the city as an emphatically German setting, as opposed
to international and multiethnic Vienna. Against the background of
this inner contradiction in Munich's double identity - xenophobic
backwater and progressive metropolis - Large constructs his grim
tale, which includes Munich's violent experiment in communism
(1918-19), Hitler's thwarted Beer Hall Putsch (1923), and his
brutal rise to the German chancellorship in Berlin (1933). His tale
ends with the entry of American soldiers into the defeated Bavarian
capital, but Large also appends an epilogue in which he ponders,
among other things, the Allies' problematical policy of
"denazification." According to Large, General Patton, the military
governor of Munich and Bavaria, believed that denazification was
ill advised, for "ex-Nazis no longer presented a danger in
comparison with the communists. Postwar Allied policy, he declared,
was persecuting 'a pretty good race' and opening German lands to
'Mongolian savages.' "Eisenhower relieved Patton of his duty, but
his policy of tolerance toward former Nazis prevailed. A readable,
informative, and solid book. Large does not startle us with new
discoveries or ideas, but he does look at this piece of history
from a unifying perspective that is both illuminating and
significant. (Kirkus Reviews)
An engrossing account of the city where Nazism took root, the place that put Hitler on the road to power.
The capital of the Nazi movement was not Berlin but Munich. So said the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, of this handsome Bavarian town on the banks of the Isar River. Why did Nazism flourish in the "Athens of the Isar"?
In exploring this question David Clay Large begins in Munich's "golden age," the four decades before World War I when its culture generated some of the outstanding works of the modernist spirit. But here he finds a dark side, a proto-fascist cultural heritage that proved fertile soil for Hitler's movement. From the violent experience of the Munich Soviet in 1918-19 through Hitler's failed Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923 and on to his appointment as German chancellor in 1933, Large weaves a harrowing narrative of the rise of Nazism. As he did in his previous book, Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s (Norton), Large succeeds here in "putting the story back into history for these dreadful years" (Choice).
"David Clay Large knows how to write. . . . He has a sense of drama equal to that of another popular historian, William Manchester."—Frank J. Prial, New York Times Book Review
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