Bystander Society
Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 1 November 2023
- ISBN 9780197691717
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages488 pages
- Size 236x165x38 mm
- Weight 1021 g
- Language English
- Illustrations Approx. 30 B/W images 508
Categories
Short description:
The most commonly asked--and bitterly debated--question about Germans during the Nazi era is, "how much did they know?" Were they aware of what was being committed in their name? As Mary Fulbrook argues in this haunting and original new book, that's the wrong question to ask. It's not what people knew; it's what they did with what they knew.
MoreLong description:
In this powerful and revelatory new work, historian Mary Fulbrook takes on one of the most fraught issues in modern times: the role of ordinary Germans in enabling the rise of Nazism and with it the exclusion, persecution, and then extermination of millions of people across Europe. The question often asked of the Nazi era?what and when did ordinary Germans know about the crimes being committed in their name??is, Fulbrook argues, the wrong one. The real question is how they interpreted and acted?or failed to act?upon what they knew; and how, in the process, became complicit.
To address these issues, Fulbrook examines German society before and during the Nazi regime, exploring the social conditions that eventually facilitated mass murder. She explores the creation of a "bystander society," one in which the majority of Germans were either unable to act or developed growing indifference to the fate of those deemed "non-Aryan"?mainly Jews? and therefore outside the Volksgemeinschaft, or national community. Over the course of the 1930s, from Hitler's assumption of the German chancellorship, through the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, to the devastation of Kristallnacht, this "bystander society" became more entrenched. Ordinary Germans became passive about the fate of "non-Aryans" and, by turning away, contributed to their isolation from mainstream society. For many citizens of the Reich, conformity led progressively through growing complicity in everyday racism to more active involvement in genocide during World War Two. In other words, social changes under Nazi rule shaped the perceptions and responses of German citizens, creating the conditions that made the Holocaust possible.
Based on an extraordinary archive of personal accounts, Bystander Society moves between the individual and the wider context, highlighting the significance of changing social and political circumstances over the course of the Nazi period by offering first-hand testimony both from those who were its primary victims, and those who initially sought to stay on the side lines but could not avoid being caught up in the violence of the times. These accounts illuminate how interpersonal relations in everyday life shifted, such that some fellow citizens could first be viewed as outcasts and then, in wartime, deported?most often to their deaths?in full view of those who would later often claim ignorance of their fates.
Chilling and illuminating, Bystander Society reconceives the whole notion of "bystanding" within Nazi Germany, offering an interpretation of the conditions for inaction, one with wide and enduring relevance.
A commendable attempt to understand why people stood by and did nothing when confronted with Nazi barbarism, written by one of the greatest historians of modern Germany.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Bystanders and collective violence
PART I THE SLIPPERY SLOPE: SOCIAL SEGREGATION IN NAZI GERMANY
Lives in Germany before 1933
Falling into line: spring 1933
Ripping apart at the seams: the racialization of identity, 1933-4
Shifting communities: dissembling and the cost of conformity
A nation of Aryans? The normalization of racial discrimination
PART II THE EXPANSION OF VIOLENCE AT HOME AND ABROAD
Changing horizons: views from within and without
Shock waves: polarization in peacetime society, November 1938
Divided fates: empathy, exit, and death, 1939-41
Over the precipice: from persecution to genocide in the Baltics
Inner emigration and the fiction of ignorance
Towards the end: rescue, survival, and self-justifications
CONCLUSION
The bystander myth and responses to violence
