How much do we now need to know about the Third Reich, and just what is it about that distant era that we should seek to understand? Judging by the books and endless television programmes inflicted on us, the demand remains virtually inexhaustible, though much reflects a banal taste for pornography rather than a thirst for knowledge. The films about "Hitler's women" or the "death camps" are often fuelled with salacious intent.
When I was taught about the origins of the Third Reich at Oxford in the early 1960s, two schools of thought predominated. One saw Nazism as the inevitable by-product of German history, the other thought it had been invented by big business as the final stage of monopoly capitalism. Such issues are not much debated today, partly because the world has changed, and partly because new documentation and research have unveiled other areas of interest. This has given fresh impetus to the study of where the Nazi phenomenon came from, and produced additional topics for discussion.
It is appropriate, therefore, that Penguin should present the general reader in the 21st century with a modern account of the Nazi era. In Richard Evans, the publisher has found the right man for the job. Now a professor at Cambridge, after a long stint at Birkbeck College in London, Evans has become one of Britain's most formidable historians, an academic with no fear of stepping into the public realm. He has castigated postmodernism and excommunicated David Irving with considerable vigour. His own research into unusual aspects of German history, as well as his familiarity with the work of other historians, gives him the authority to tackle questions old and new.
He is also a fluent and impassioned writer, sprinkling his analysis with a series of illuminating character sketches and a number of unfamiliar and revealing anecdotes. He evokes well the murky atmosphere created by the far right in the 1920s, and is very good on the Nazi wives, who were often more extreme in their views than their husbands and given to offbeat ideas. Frau Himmler was plainly an early hippy, interested in "occultism, herbalism, homoeopathy". Ludendorff's wife helped start the Tannenberg League, which attacked not just the Jews, but also the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. Evans notes that the Nazis scored well with women at the polls. Other cameo appearances include the odious Franz von Papen, a man so anxious to restore the ancien regime destroyed in Europe by the French revolution that he abolished the use of the guillotine in Prussia, replacing it with the hand-held axe, perceived as a more traditional Prussian instrument.
The Coming of the Third Reich is the first volume of a three-part project. It starts with Bismarck, re-examines the stability and legitimacy of the Weimar republic, and records the rise of the extreme right until the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933. The second volume will deal with the development of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, and the third will concentrate on war and conquest, racial extermination, and collapse. Penguin's general readership, one hopes, will include newsreaders, newspaper editors and owners, the makers of television programmes and other opinion-formers, whose knowledge and understanding of German history are often so woefully out of date.
What has long been necessary in Britain is a history written with an appreciation of today's Germany, rather than with a jaundiced recollection of what once was. Modern Germany, with its leanings towards environmentalism and pacifism, its large Turkish population, its historically unprecedented recovery from dictatorship, destruction and division, has been transformed into one of contemporary Europe's most admirable societies. We need to remember Bismarck when contemplating the Nazis, but we also need to think about Helmuts Schmidt and Kohl - and Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schroder.
Evans writes with a modern sensibility and keeps an alert eye on today's preoccupations. He is familiar with women's rights and the green debate, with electoral arithmetic and inner-party divisions. He even has a thoughtful paragraph about "the crisis in masculinity" evolving in Germany before 1914, as nationalists called for women to be brought back into the home.
He is caustic about attempts to suggest that Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were two sides of the same coin. Totalitarianism can be a useful concept, he argues, but it does not explain how Nazism and Stalinism followed very different routes to power. Nazism, in his view, was not the unavoidable outcome of the course of German history, as the historian A J P Taylor argued during the war, but it does no harm to claim that its success was based "on political and ideological traditions that were specifically German in character". To those who talk loosely about the proto-Nazi disposition exhibited in German history, Evans points out that Germans have a liberal and democratic tradition as well. Yet he does not let the Germans off lightly. In his judgement of the collaboration with the Nazis, he concludes that most Germans were more interested in politics, and more aware of what was going on, than some historians have acknowledged.
A number of recent histories (in particular, Michael Burleigh's much-praised The Third Reich: a new history) have emphasised the role of violence in the unfolding of the Nazi drama, and Evans follows this line in arguing that the political use of violence before and after 1933 was a vital Nazi characteristic. Political violence may well have been more widespread throughout history than we are sometimes led to believe. The novelty of the Nazis was to subject the Germans (and later the Jews and the Russians) to behaviour that had previously been reserved by German governments for the Herero people of what is now Namibia, and the Wangoni of German East Africa.
Evans suggests that the Nazi concentration camps - first set up in Dachau, outside Munich, in March 1933, for officials from the Communist and Social Democrat parties - had their origin not so much in the British camps in South Africa (or the Spanish ones in colonial Cuba) as in the German camps in Swakopmund and Luderitz Bay between 1904 and 1907, where 14,000 Hereros were "concentrated". Nearly half that number died in captivity, itself a small percentage of the exterminated Africans - whose population declined from 80,000 to 15,000 in just a few years.
A historian's historian, Evans defines his terms very tightly. He has already written an excoriating critique of postmodernism in his In Defence of History, and the burden of his attack on Irving in Telling Lies about Hitler was that his unreliability when it came to documents meant he could not really be considered a historian at all. (A bit harsh, I thought. Could he not simply have been dismissed as a bad historian?) He complains that the study of Nazi Germany since the 1990s "has been invaded by concepts and approaches derived from morality, religion and the law". These, he argues, are wholly unsuitable for a work of history.
Evans seems to be directing his criticisms towards Burleigh, whose book introduced a strong sense of contemporary moralism. But he may also be swiping at the debate stirred by Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, about the reaction of German scientists to the Americans' success in developing a weapon of mass destruction before they did. (John Cornwell's recent book Hitler's Scientists: science, war and the devil's pact is a useful but rather journalistic account of science in the Nazi era that provides further fuel for the argument.) It is "inappropriate for a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgement", Evans writes. It is not just unhistorical, "it is arrogant and presumptuous".
I have a few minor caveats. Maybe Evans makes too much of the Nazi hostility to atonal music and abstract art. Was it really such an affront to bourgeois values? Apart from an excellent section on the Depression, he is not strong on economic issues, presenting several pages on the familiar drama of hyperinflation in 1922-23, but only a sentence on how it was resolved by Hjalmar Schacht.
Over the years, I have sometimes found reading books about the Third Reich rather a chore. This one proved hugely enjoyable. Evans is an agreeable and knowledgeable companion with whom to travel through the dense thickets of 20th-century German history, and I look forward to the remaining volumes of his trilogy with enthusiasm.
Richard Gott's history of Cuba will be published next year by Yale University Press
