Sadly, humans are experts in war. Over millennia, we have honed it into an art, a science, a pastime. Its prosecution has spawned as many feuds as it has founded cultural institutions and codes of honor which venerate its practice, to our cost. But as damaging as war can be -- just a glance at the 20th century is confirmation enough --, its legacy is even more powerful. For the more that we wrap ourselves in the honor of our flags, the more we link our self-esteem to the strength of our national institutions, the less we can accept defeat. Someone must have betrayed us, mislead us, tricked us. We could not have been vanquished from the battlefield any other way. We are the best; everyone tells us so.
This is a dangerous mindset. For as soon as defeat is assured, excuses are generated, excuses that flower into grievances, grievances that mature into fantasies of revenge. We've only to look at the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans or the cultural ones in the Middle East to see the damage wrought by this most vicious cycle. So how can we stop it ? How can a violent country be defeated and pacified without inspiring rancor, hate and recrimination? Mr. Taylor asks as much in this treatise on post-Nazi Germany. His answers are compelling.
Long before Germany's destruction ended the Second World War in Europe, the world was aware of the extensive program of social engineering being conducted in that most proud and ancient country. Hitler, capitalizing on German pride, on the scarcity of jobs, on the plundering of national resources, and on the slights of the French, had, for 20 years, been inculcating Germans with his revanchist anger. Their historic defeat in World War I was a betrayal. For the greatest nation on Earth, populated by the greatest people in human history, could not be brought low by any coalition of inferiors. And even if the defeat was deserved, which it wasn't, the Treaty of Versailles, in which the French took advantage of a weakened Germany to attack her industry and confiscate her land, was unjust. These ideas, which found fertile soil in a starving, struggling Germany, catalyzed a revisionist revolution which culminated in the rise of Hitler to power, the implementation of his fascist ideas, and the destruction of German opposition to what would become some of the most murderous government policies in history.
Hitler was wrong of course. He was wrong about the war; he was wrong about Germany. Not that it mattered... In seeking to provide for the German people a salve for their pride, he gave them a license to hate. He institutionalized racism and a sense of superiority that promised to sustain the war, if only in the hearts of defeated Germans, long after his death. Understanding this better than they understood Hitler's Nazi threat, the Allies, exhausted by war, set upon a bold and difficult course. Germany had to be rebuilt, culturally, economically, fiscally. It had to be made aware of its sins, but not punished for them. For to do that would be to trigger yet another cycle of conflict no one could afford. In covering the trials and tribunals, the policies and the textbooks, the politicians and their constituencies, Mr. Taylor describes the myriad ways in which the Allies reformed German society in hopes of bleeding the poison from its wounds and restoring it to what they considered health.
Exorcising Hitler is a powerful history of postwar Germany. Though Mr. Taylor focuses too much on the immediate aftermath of Germany's defeat, banishing to his epilogue the cultural transformation that took place in subsequent decades, the extent to which he meticulously reconstructs the Nazi culture and juxtaposes it with the suffering of the defeated Germans is as informative as it is gripping. The author summons both startling statistics and painful first-hand accounts which demonstrate not only the German desire to believe in Hitler's revisionist narrative, but the lengths to which they were willing to go to actualize it. In this, Mr. Taylor is as successful in presenting a convincing case for how Germans were indoctrinated as he is in describing how the Allies tried, successfully and otherwise, to peacefully encourage Germany back into the fold of nations.
For all the work's successes, I am troubled by the extent to which Mr. Taylor downplays the cultural reforms of later decades. In choosing to focus on the immediate aftermath of the war, he has emphasized the Allied role in reforming Germany. And though their wisdom should certainly be credited for helping that proud nation restore itself, Germans themselves are solely responsible for revisiting the root sins of their own culture. They changed their worldview, not the Allies. Thus, when Mr. Taylor confines these reforms to a few dozen pages at the end of his 400-plus-page chronicle, he is deemphasizing Germany's contribution to its remarkable turnaround.
Though it suffers for abbreviating the equally important reforms of later decades, reforms that Germans undertook themselves, This is a thorough account of a difficult and complex time. Wonderful if unbalanced work. (3/5 Stars)
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