Review of \u3ci\u3eConspiracy\u3c/i\u3e (BBC/HBO Films), directed by Frank Pierson from a script by Loring Mandel

Conspiracy is a docudrama about the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, at which Nazi officials discussed implementation of the Final Solution. Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the meeting brought together a dozen representatives from state and party agencies involved in the genocide of Europe\u27s Jews. The notoriety of the meeting stems in large part from the fact that a summary of the proceedings- the so-called Wannsee Protokoll authored by Adolf Eichmann, who was also present-survived the war. Historians have used the document to implicate a broad spectrum of German bureaucracies in the mass murder, to demonstrate the leading role played by the SS, and to underscore the cold premeditation with which the killing was conceived and planned. ... This film, we are informed in the closing credits, is based on a true story, with some scenes, events, and characters created or changed for dramatic purposes. Although academic specialists will doubtlessly be perturbed by inaccuracies and interpolations, Conspiracy, to its credit, does not stray very far from what is factually plausible. The main danger with this kind of film is that most viewers will not be able to tell the difference between plausible speculation and documented fact

Review of \u3ci\u3eConspiracy\u3c/i\u3e (BBC/HBO Films), directed by Frank Pierson from a script by Loring Mandel

Conspiracy is a docudrama about the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, at which Nazi officials discussed implementation of the Final Solution. Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the meeting brought together a dozen representatives from state and party agencies involved in the genocide of Europe\u27s Jews. The notoriety of the meeting stems in large part from the fact that a summary of the proceedings- the so-called Wannsee Protokoll authored by Adolf Eichmann, who was also present-survived the war. Historians have used the document to implicate a broad spectrum of German bureaucracies in the mass murder, to demonstrate the leading role played by the SS, and to underscore the cold premeditation with which the killing was conceived and planned. ... This film, we are informed in the closing credits, is based on a true story, with some scenes, events, and characters created or changed for dramatic purposes. Although academic specialists will doubtlessly be perturbed by inaccuracies and interpolations, Conspiracy, to its credit, does not stray very far from what is factually plausible. The main danger with this kind of film is that most viewers will not be able to tell the difference between plausible speculation and documented fact

Review of \u3ci\u3ePublic Libraries in Nazi Germany\u3c/i\u3e, by Margaret F. Stieg.

Nazi cultural policy has only recently begun to attract a level of scholarly attention commensurate with its importance. Having relied for decades on memoirs, fragmentary documentary publications, and impressionistic accounts, historians are now devoting their energies to systematic, in-depth studies of the experiences of artists, performers, and writers under National Socialism. Margaret F. Stieg\u27s book augments this expanding literature by focusing on an institution that was central to the dissemination of culture and knowledge: the public library. The central theme of Stieg\u27s study is, perhaps not surprisingly, the politicization of libraries and librarianship: In its fully developed form the Nazi public library defines the political public library (p. 2). ... The book is impressively documented and presents a wealth of new material on the apparatus of censorship, the role of public libraries in the cultural politics of border regions, and the impact of national library policy on German Catholicism

Review of Otto Dov Kulka, ed., \u3ci\u3eDeutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus.Band I: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden 1933-1939\u3c/i\u3e

The edited volume of documents under review ... brings together materials reflecting a wide spectrum of Jewish communal activities in Germany from just before the advent of the Nazi regime to 1939. A second volume, covering the period 1939-1943, is in preparation. The chronological division of the volumes follows milestones in the organizational evolution of German Jews in the Nazi era. In 1932, in the face of intensifying antisemitism, an attempt was made to overcome factionalism within the German-Jewish community. The resulting umbrella association, which came to be known as the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, encompassed the majority, but not the entirety, of German Jewry. Orthodox Jews refused to join an organization that would inevitably be dominated by the more mainstream Liberal form of Judaism, while Jews who were oriented toward German nationalism objected to the Reichsvertretung\u27s acquiescence in a ghetto mentality as well as to its toleration of Zionism. These ideological divisions, and efforts to overcome them so as to protect Jewish interests more effectively, constitute one of the volume\u27s major themes. These divisions paled, however, as conditions deteriorated, and the dissenting groups had joined the Reichsvertretung by 1939 when, under government pressure, it was transformed into the more centralized Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. Whereas the present volume is devoted to the material generated by the Reichsvertretung, the succeeding volume will document the history of the Reichsvereinigung. The editing of this volume is masterful. Each document is preceded by an effective introduction, explanatory footnotes clarify potentially obscure passages, and bibliographical footnotes guide the user to up-to-date published scholarship. The editors have also appended an almost 100-page reference glossary of names and terms, an exhaustive bibliography of publications. and a detailed chronology. The language barrier may prevent access to non-specialists, but the collection will undoubtedly serve to promote further study of the subject by scholars and students who can read German. Hopefully the improved understanding of the Jewish experience in Nazi Germany made possible by this volume and its successor will ultimately trickle down to a wider readership

Review of \u3ci\u3eJews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations\u3c/i\u3e by Lynn Rapaport

This book is a major addition to the small, but growing, body of scholarship about Jewish life in post-World War II Germany. Rapaport presents a richly textured portrait of Jewish daily life, focusing primarily on the processes that produce and preserve a sense of Jewish identity. ... According to Rapaport, collective historical memory, not religion, has been the crucial factor in shaping the identity of these post-Holocaust Jews. The central event in that memory is the Holocaust. In response to critics who have argued that the attention of Jews in the contemporary world is excessively and unhealthily focused on the Holocaust, Rapaport asserts that Jews in Gerlmany have successfully instrumentalized the Holocaust as a major strategy for community survival (256-257). ... Rapaport hopes that her study will raise awareness among sociologists that collective memory is a significant factor in defining ethnic identity (256). Historians (who have understood this phenomenon for some time) will find in Rapaport a good example of how to understand ethnic mentality as the product of an interaction between collective memory and the dense reality of everyday life

Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The \u3ci\u3eKampfbund für deutsche Kultur\u3c/i\u3e

Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist movement transformed itself from an insurgent fringe party into Germany\u27s most potent political force. The most important factor in this dramatic turnabout in political fortunes was the rapid deterioration of the German economy beginning in 1929. It does not, however, logically follow that the German people simply fell into the lap of the party and its charismatic leader. To the contrary, the party aggressively employed sophisticated propagandistic and organizational strategies for attracting and mobilizing diverse segments of German society. With the onset of the economic crisis, and the consequent social and political turmoil, the party stood ready to receive, organize, and mobilize Germans from all social strata. Cultural issues featured prominently in propaganda, particularly in the latter, decisive phase of the Nazis\u27 rise to power. After its breakthrough in the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the NSDAP wasted little time before going on a cultural offensive. In December 1930, for example, provocations in Berlin achieved a major symbolic victory, compelling the government to ban the film version of Remarque\u27s All Quiet on the Western Front. Despite such successes, the movement\u27s reliance on artistic and cultural strategies during its rise to power has not been subjected to rigorous analysis. Although several studies have examined the cultural policies implemented by the Nazis once in power, the historiography is deficient when it comes to the role of cultural politics in pre-1933 mobilization strategies. Ironically, the use of art and culture as a political weapon by the left-wing parties has generated far more scholarly interest

Review of Michael Berkowitz, \u3ci\u3eZionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War\u3c/i\u3e

In this elegantly written and nicely designed book, Michael Berkowitz offers the reader a fascinating discussion of Zionism as a cultural phenomenon among the assimilated Jews of western and central Europe in the two decades preceding World War I. Berkowitz is particularly interested in how the Zionist movement employed political symbols, myths, and icons in an effort to spawn a new Jewish national consciousness to which assimilated bourgeois Jews in France, Britain, and Germany could safely subscribe without compromising their allegiance to the country of their citizenship. In contrast to the masses of Russian-Polish and Rumanian Jews, for whom migration to Palestine made practical sense as an escape from official anti- Semitism and increasingly frequent pogroms, the Jews of West-Central Europe desired, by and large, to remain where they lived. For them, Zionism was not merely an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with their less fortunate eastern cousins, but was also an outlet for manifesting a revised notion of Jewishness that contravened many of the dominant stereotypes held by non-Jews and Jews alike. Berkowitz\u27s examination of how the Zionist movement constructed this Zionist culture situates Zionism in its fin-de-siecle context by elucidating its connections with prevailing notions of nationalism, cultural authenticity, and masculinity. While the book has obvious import to scholars and students of Jewish history, its historicization of Zionism as a European cultural phenomenon should excite interest among a broad spectrum of historians and cultural studies scholars

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich\u3c/i\u3e, by Michael Kater.

Ths is a serious book about serious music. Michael Kater\u27s Twisted Muse is the author\u27s second major contribution in five years to the study of music under National Socialism. In hs previous volume, Different Drummers (Oxford, 1992), Kater provided a detailed and nuanced examination of jazz under the Nazis. In his new book, Kater turns his attention to the world of serious (ernste) music, a category encompassing not only classical compositions and performances, but also a good deal of the contemporary music of the 1930s and 1940s.This book bears many of the hallmarks of Kater\u27s earlier work on jazz: resourceful research, copious documentation, straightforward writing, and a good working knowledge of music. Perhaps of even greater importance is that this book, like the one on jazz, succeeds brilliantly in conveying a sense of the ambiguities and contradictions of musical life in Nazi Germany. ... Kater devotes many pages to German musicians who attempted to buck Nazi trends, and to those who left the country. His chapter on Persecuted and Exiled Jewish and Anti-Nazi Musicians offers fascinating portraits of several of the century\u27s most important musical figures, such as Bruno Walter, Arnold Schonberg, Otto Klemperer, and Kurt Weill. Kater has performed a valuable service by bringing their stories together in one place, integrating them into a study whose main focus is on what took place inside Germany\u27s borders. These exiled German musicians were, after all, representatives of German musical traditions, a fact that should not be obscured by their physical separation from Germany, or by the willingness of the majority of their colleagues to make music under the auspices of National Socialis

Review of \u3ci\u3eFolklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde\u3c/i\u3e, by Hannjost Lixfeld, and \u3ci\u3eThe Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich\u3c/i\u3e, edited and translated by James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld

Taken together, these two books do much to explode what they characterize as the myth of two German folklores. This is the notion, still disturbingly widespread in German academia, that during the National Socialist era the field of Volkskunde was split into two distinct groups, the first consisting of serious scholars whose work remained largely untainted by Nazism, and the second consisting of hacks, publicists, and weak scholars who championed the Nazi ideology and program. By dispelling this myth, these volumes contribute to the ever-growing body of scholarship that documents the role of traditional German elites in the legitimation and promotion of National Socialism. The simplistic differentiation between a respectable and moderate establishment, on the one hand, and a radicalized Nazi insurgency on the other, might have helped facilitate the reintegration of academic and cultural elites into postwar West German society, but it has not held up under the scrutiny of historians

Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Holocaust in American Life\u3c/i\u3e, by Peter Novick.

The Holocaust has undeniably become a fixture in American culture. What has come to be called the Americanization of the Holocaust is the subject of several recent books, a lively discussion within the American Jewish community, and even a course in American history at the University of Heidelberg. Among the many attempts to document and explain how the Holocaust has been Americanized, perhaps the most ambitious and provocative is Peter Novick\u27s The Holocaust in American Life. The book is ambitious both on account of its chronological breadth, covering the entire period from the Second World War to the present day, as well as on account of the wide range of published and unpublished sources consulted by the author. It is provocative primarily because it argues that the preoccupation with the Holocaust has not been a healthy phenomenon for American society, its Jewish minority, and a balanced understanding of the Holocaust itself