Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance: 28 (Monographs in German History, 28) - Hardcover

Brown, Timothy Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845455649 ISBN 13: 9781845455644

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2009

Synopsis

Exploring the gray zone of infiltration and subversion in which the Nazi and Communist parties sought to influence and undermine each other, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between Communism and Fascism-a key problem of twentieth-century German history. The struggle between Nazism and Communism is situated within a broader conversation among right and left-wing publicists, across the Youth Movement and in the National BolshevikA" scene, thus revealing the existence of a discourse on revolutionary legitimacy fought according to a set of common assumptions about the qualities of the ideal revolutionary. Highlighting the importance of a masculine-militarist politics of youth revolt operative in both Marxist and anti-Marxist guises, Weimar Radicals forces us to re-think the fateful relationship between the two great ideological competitors of the Weimar Republic, while offering a challenging new interpretation of the distinctive radicalism of the interwar era.

About this title

Review

"Brown's [innovative study] makes a vital contribution to an understanding of the Weimar Republic as a set of competing political stages, where radicalism was not the direct result of social or economic circumstances, but part and parcel of a deliberate dramatization of political speech." - German History

"This is a remarkable, provocative, and eloquent study of the mutual suspicion, mutual citation, and mutual competition between Communists and Nazis who defined radicalism in terms of authenticity as well as ideology and thereby found themselves to be political intimates as well as adversaries. Timothy Brown provides an entirely new perspective on the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich." - Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich

..". exciting and informative." - H-Soz-u-Kult

"This splendid book offers a fresh look at the extraordinarily violent cultural-political radicalism of the post-World War I era, which has long been obscured by the Manichean dualism of anticommunism/antifascism and the Cold War. Brown shows convincingly that the multitude of militant-male mass-based radical movements of Weimar Germany cannot be understood simply as dichotomous pre-fascist and pre-communist antecedents to Hitler and Stalin.... [A] sophisticated cultural interpretation." - Diethelm Prowe, Carleton College

About the Author

Timothy S. Brown is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. A two-time Fulbright recipient, his work has appeared in the American Historical Review, the German Studies Review, and Contemporary European History. He is currently working on a monograph entitled 1968: West Germany in the World.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1845455649
• ISBN 13: 9781845455644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 225