Defeated in World War I, living in a troubled and insecure peace, Germans under the Weimar Republic were a ready audience for visionary writers who indulged in elaborate fantasies of victorious wars of revenge and of German renewal through wondrous technological inventions. Largely ignored by the literary establishment, these writers created an immensely popular mass literature, the "Zukunftsroman" ("novel about the future"), that was a potent ingredient in the simmering stew of resentment, frustrated nationalism, political irrationalism, and economic distress so important in the Nazi rise to...