Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History(Routledge Studies in Second World War History)

A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler’s rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies around Nazism that took place after the regime’s demise, the philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts—from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit—and the role of Auschwitz in European history.

Table of Contents:
“The Attraction of Fascism Itself”: Anson Rabinbach’s Writings on Nazism and its Opponents; Part I: Nazism; 1. Beauty of Labor: The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich (1976); Appendix: No Angel from Hell: The Collapse of the Speer Myth (2006); 2. Organized Mass Culture in the Third Reich: The Women of Kraft durch Freude (1986); 3. The Emotional Core of Fascism in its Most Virulent Psychic Manifestations: Introduction to Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (with Jessica Benjamin, 1989); 4. The Reader, the Popular Novel, and the Imperative to Participate: Public and Private Experience in the Third Reich (1991); 5. Nazi Culture: The Sacred, the Aesthetic, and the Popular (2005); 6. The Humanities in Nazi Germany (with Wolfgang Bialas, 2006); 7. The Temporary Alliance Between the Elite and the Mob (2013); Part II: Antifascism; 8. Antifascism (2006); 9. The Politicization of Wilhelm Reich (1973); 10. Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (2008); 11. Freedom for Thälmann! The Comintern and the Campaign to Free Ernst Thälmann, 1933-39 (2016); 12. Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism (1977); 13. Man on Ice: The Persecution and Assassination of Otto Katz (2006); Part III: Aftermath; 14. Toward a Marxist Theory of Fascism and National Socialism (1974); 15. Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Arendt Controversy (2004); 16. The Frankfurt School and the “Jewish Question,” 1940-1970 (2013); 17. The Myth and Legacy of Alexander Mitscherlich (1995); 18. The Jewish Question in the German Question: On the Historikerstreit (1988); 19. “The Abyss that Opened up Before Us”: Auschwitz and Modernity (2003); Appendix: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Death Machine (1986); 20. Moments of Totalitarianism (2006); “Nazism was a unique modernist project”: Interview with Anson Rabinbach, December 2, 2019

About the Author :
Anson Rabinbach is Philip and Beulah Robbins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of The Human Motor (1990), In the Shadow of Catastrophe (1997) and The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor (2018), and co-editor of The Third Reich Sourcebook (2013). He is a founding editor of New German Critique. Stefanos Geroulanos is Professor of History at New York University, a co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the author of Transparency in Postwar France (2017) and The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (with Todd Meyers, 2018). Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar, Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of, among others, Sex after Fascism (2005), Cold War Freud (2017), and Unlearning Eugenics (2018).