The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europeby Sheri Berman

✍ Scribed by Review by: Stanley Hoffmann

• Book ID: 125222167
• Publisher: Council on Foreign Relations
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 340 KB
• Volume: 78
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0015-7120
• DOI: 10.2307/20049237

✦ Synopsis

Recent Books huge volume of a two-volume biography of Hitler. In a brilliant introduction, he dismisses the issue of Hitler's "greatness" and explains that his focus is on Hitler's power?how he acquired it, how he exercised it, and why political resistance was so tame. Kershaw neglects the "private" Hitler and investigates instead the political and social context of the Nazi era, arguing that Hitler's main beliefs, especially his anti-Semitism, were crystallized during his years as a vagrant in Vienna and revived during World War I. In his eyes, Hitler's ascension to power was not inevitable. Rather, it resulted from the miscalculations of other politicians,