The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler's Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century

ISBN-13: 9781107658288 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 310 str.

Thomas Kuhne

Opis

This is an innovative account of how the concept of comradeship shaped the actions, emotions and ideas of ordinary German soldiers across the two world wars and during the Holocaust. Using individual soldiers' diaries, personal letters and memoirs, Kuhne reveals the ways in which soldiers' longing for community, and the practice of male bonding and togetherness, sustained the Third Reich's pursuit of war and genocide. Comradeship fuelled the soldiers' fighting morale. It also propelled these soldiers forward into war crimes and acts of mass murders. Yet, by practising comradeship, the soldiers could maintain the myth that they were morally sacrosanct. Post-1945, the notion of kameradschaft as the epitome of humane and egalitarian solidarity allowed Hitler's soldiers to join the euphoria for peace and democracy in the Federal Republic, finally shaping popular memories of the war through the end of the twentieth century.

Recenzje

'Probing into the Janus-faced quality of comradeship, Thomas Kühne illuminates the moral world of Nazi Germany on its own terms, a world in which most German soldiers acted as they did, not because they were forced to do so, but because they thought it was right. Obsessed with the 'virtue' of being held in high esteem by their 'masculine' comrades, they had scant concern for their victims. This book makes an essential contribution to understanding the capacity to commit terrible atrocities without remorse in Nazi Germany.' Christopher Browning, University of North Carolina

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction: a concept from a different world; Part I. The Myth of Comradeship, 1914–1939: 1. Healing; 2. Coalescence; 3. Steeling; Part II. The Practice of Comradeship, 1939–1945: 4. Assimilation; 5. Megalomania; 6. Nemesis; Part III. The Decline of Comradeship: 7. Privatisation; 8. Integration; 9. Demonisation; Conclusion: protean masculinity and Germany's twentieth century; Index.

O autorze

Kühne, Thomas Thomas Kühne is Strassler Chair in Holocaust History and Professor of History at Clark University, Massachusetts. His research, published in English, German and other languages, focuses on modern Germany and explores the cultural history of war and genocide and the construction of collective identity through mass violence. His awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the German Bundestag Research Prize.