|
Product Description
“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
- The Nature of the Judicial Process
- Courts, Judges, and Politics
- The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment (The Thom Hartmann Hidden History Series)
- My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
- Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century
- Defying Hitler: A Memoir
- By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission
- It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics)
- Tartuffe (Dover Thrift Editions)
*If this is not the "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 8, 2024 09:39 +08.