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 always identifiable no matter how strenuously he or she tried to assimilate (p. 39). When one turns to the bibliography to figure out where this is coming from, there are no works on German or Habsburg Jewry. In the context of the book, this is a small issue; nevertheless it should be incumbent on the author of a popular history not to perpetuate stereotypes inadvertently.
Overall, The Making of Adolf Hitler is a readable, well-illustrated, general survey of German history from the 1890s until 1933 organized around the key issues that affected Hitler's life. Its strength lies in the description of Weimar's weaknesses and collapse. The book's weakness lies in its failure to incorporate the interpretive questions that have driven German historiography for the last thirty years.
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Samuel Goodfellow. Review of Davidson, Eugene, The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
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