Soldaten

Even as early as 1935, the vast majority of Germans would have been able to identify what was particular about the society of the Third Reich, and they would have contrasted it to the previous Weimar Republic: incipient economic improvement, enhanced feelings of security and orderliness, regained national pride, and an identification with the Führer would have been among those points. Precisely because of the radical distinctions perceived between the Third Reich and the Weimar Republic, often dismissed as an era of overly bureaucratic systems, this second-order reference frame was unusually conscious. Interviews with people from the time are full of statements about a “new” and “better” age dawning, in which the outlook was “pointing up again,” things were “moving forward,” young people were “getting off the streets,” a sense of “community” was becoming palpable. In terms of people’s historical experience, the years between 1933 and 1945 were much more clearly contoured than either the preceding Weimar Republic or the post–World War II reconstruction periods in either West or East Germany. That’s why it is easier to sketch out a frame of reference for the Third Reich than for comparatively calm periods. The Third Reich was a period with a remarkable density of experiences, full of change and characterized by an eight-year phase of radical euphoria and a four-year period of rapidly increasing fear, violence, loss, and insecurity. The fact that this period etched itself so indelibly into German history is not just due to Nazi crimes against humanity and extreme mass violence. It also has to do with the sense of being involved in something new and momentous, of working on a common National Socialist project. In short, people felt a part of a “great age.”

But the history of social mores and mentality during the Third Reich is usually viewed through the prism of the Holocaust—as though the end of a monstrously dynamic social process full of contradictory half developments and “path dependencies” (decisions or outcomes that depend on previous decisions or outcomes) can shed analytic light on the beginning of that process. This is understandable because the horrors inflicted by National Socialism are indelibly etched on our historical understanding of the movement and its campaigns of annihilation. But methodologically, such an approach is pure nonsense. No one would think of writing the biography of an individual from his death to his birth or of reconstructing the history of an institution from the back to the front. Developments are open solely toward the future, not the past. Only in retrospect do developments appear inevitable and compulsory. While they are still developing, social processes contain a rich variety of possibilities, of which only a handful are actually taken up, and they in turn create certain path dependencies and a dynamic of their own.

When we try to reconstruct people’s behavior within the reference frame Third Reich, we have to trace how they were “national socialized,” how the mélange of ideological desires at play when the Nazis came into power became part of revised social practice in Germany. We also need to look at what stayed the same after Hitler became German chancellor on January 30, 1933. Numerous critics have pointed out that we should not confuse the social reality of the Third Reich with the increasingly perfected images developed by the scriptwriters and directors in Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. The Third Reich did not consist of an endless series of Olympic Summer Games and Nuremberg party rallies, of parades and pathos-laden speeches enrapturing young, blond, pigtailed devotees with tears in their eyes. The Third Reich consisted first and foremost of a multitude of mundane everyday factors that structure people’s lives in every imaginable society. Children attended school, and adults went to work or to the unemployment office. They paid their rent, did their shopping, ate breakfast and lunch, met up with friends and family members, read newspapers and books, and talked sports or politics. While all these dimensions of everyday life may have become increasingly tinged with ideology and racism over the twelve years of the Third Reich, they remained habits and routines. Everyday life is characterized by business as usual.