 although intriguing, minimizes the complexity of German history and exaggerates (a la Goebbels) Hitler's role in it.
This book is neither a classic nor a significant new contribution to our understanding of Hitler. Presumably it was not intended as such. That it does not carve out a new niche is obvious from the notes and the bibliography which suggest broad, but not deep, research. In itself, being a general book is not inherently a liability, but any book on twentieth-century Germany with an extensive discussion of World War I that was published in 1977 should have made mention, either in the text or in the bibliography, of the important work of Eckhart Kehr, Fritz Fischer, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Despite subsequent criticism, these historians laid out a powerful case for German complicity and guilt for World War I. Failure to incorporate this element in Chapter Three, "The War and the Corporal," leads to a painfully glaring tendency to cast the Germans as the beleaguered victims.
Davidson appears to take the German point of view--and a conservative one at that. Weimar's problem, in the author's view, was heavily predicated on the vindicativeness of the French and the onerous economic terms of the Versailles Treaty. Among the resulting conclusions are that the German army from top to bottom did little or no wrong in World War I, the leaders of Germany were prevented from reaching peace with the western Allies in 1917 because of the Allied refusal to negotiate, the reparations (and not the bankrupting of the government to finance the prosecution of the war) were responsible for the economic calamities of the early 1920s, and the French occupation of the Ruhr blocked German economic growth and inclusion in the world's diplomatic community. Without a doubt, many, if not most, Germans perceived events this way and this had a powerful political effect which merits depiction. Much of this, moreover, has a kernel of truth. It is incumbent on the historian, however, to cut through the question of perception and, with the benefit of hindsight, distinguish between the perception and the reality.
This book seems to be a conscious attempt to bring German history and a wider understanding of the context of Adolf Hitler's rise to power to the reading public and ultimately it is as a popular history that it should be critiqued. Leaving aside the somewhat faux questions of profitability and whether success on the free market automatically legitimizes, there remains the knotty problem of what a "popular" history should be. Everyone can probably agree that a popular history should be readable. The problem comes in the discussion of accuracy and interpretation. Is a book inherently unpopular (or scholarly) if it reflects the accumulated judgment of historians, or should it play to the expectations of the readers? To what extent does the author owe readers a balanced, critical, yet readable account?
It is here that this book fails. There is a great deal of accurate detail that is useful to convey to a popular audience, but the weaknesses in interpretation mislead the reader who is not already familiar with the Third Reich. I have already mentioned several problematic issues, so I will just point out one more example--the discussion of antisemitism in the early chapters. Although Davidson is by no means whitewashing the problem of antisemitism and though he brings out some useful information about Habsburg and German antisemitism, Jews are always discussed as if they constituted a homogeneous block. In part this is just a question of voice, echoing the language of the antisemitic journals of the time, but it would be easy enough to point out the complexity of the Jewish community in Vienna at the turn of the century or the extent of Jewish assimilation in German cities. The characterization of German-Jewish relations is also marred by a failure to examine critically the claims of the contemporary antisemites that small town Jews were "readily identified with the slick, urban exploiters" (p. 38) or that "the Jew" [Davidson's words] was alw