Villanova University

HIS 8202-030: Nazi Germany

Summer 2008, T 6-8:50 pm, Falvey Library, Room 321

Dr. Paul Steege STAUG 428 x9-6963 paul.steege@villanova.edu http://www.homepage.villanova.edu/paul.steege/		Office hours: by appointment
Course Objectives:	More than sixty years after its destruction, Nazi Germany continues to exert a powerful fascination on historians and the public at large. This course will explore the evolving historiography of this regime, focusing in particular on the ways in which the Nazi revolution (including its genocidal policies) depended on popular support in both theory and practice. We will wrestle with the limits and possibilities for individual action in the midst of the Nazi regime and consider the extent to which ethical behavior remained a possible response to state-sponsored violence and genocide. This seminar is set up to focus on the assigned readings, to read and discuss them carefully, and to put them at the center of the course’s written work.
Required Books:	Bergerson, Andrew Stuart. Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: the Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Boyer, John W. and Michael Geyer, eds. Resistance Against the Third Reich 1933-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 Browning, Christopher. Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Reprint ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1999. Kluger, Ruth. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003. Peukert, Detlev J. K. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Trans. Richard Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Recommended Book:	Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation. 4^th ed. London: Arnold, 2000. Kershaw’s book provides a useful overview of the evolving historiography of Nazi Germany and may prove a helpful resource as you approach the subject.
Assignments and Grading:	Seminar participation (30% of final grade): A graduate seminar is only as good as its participants’ commitment to engaged discussion. Regular, engaged participation in class discussions is simply assumed. This does not mean that I anticipate that you will all have “the answer.” A graduate seminar is a collaborative undertaking, in which we propose, examine, and critique ideas. While our discussions must retain respect for each other and our divergent opinions, they will also allow for (and demand) rigorous, critical examination of what people have to say. Seminar preparation (20% of final grade): For five separate weeks (beginning in week 2), students must submit a one-page (double-spaced) essay that briefly frames a question or point of interest from the week’s reading. These essays are to be posted to WebCT by 5pm on the Sunday before the book is discussed. All students are expected to have read their classmates’ essays before the seminar on Tuesday. Be prepared to sign up for your preferences during the first class. 10-15 page review essay (50% of final grade): Using the materials assigned for this course, write an extended review essay of a recent book examining a related subject in the history of Nazi Germany. You may select from the brief list of related titles accompanying each week’s assignment (beginning with week 2) or—subject to instructor approval—select another appropriate work. This review should demonstrate both your ability to carefully and critically read and evaluate the book you select but also make clear your facility with the concepts, arguments, and issues raised over the course of the semester. More details will be available in an online guide. Due date to be arranged after consultation with class. According to the recently established History Department grading rubric for graduate course, a grade of “A” is granted for performance that is: exceptional; well beyond mastery and individual insights; originality; polished prose; consistent, substantive participation and intellectual leadership Additional grading criteria are available online.
Academic Integrity:	Plagiarism or cheating on any coursework will not be tolerated. Any case of academic fraud (copying of another student’s work, illicit use of notes on an exam, undocumented use of an outside source, etc.) will automatically result in a failing grade for the course and the submission of an academic integrity report to the university. If you have any questions about documenting sources or what constitutes academic fraud, please speak to me or consult the student handbook. We will discuss this in detail during the first weeks of the course.
Disabilities:	Students with disabilities who may need academic accommodations are encouraged to discuss options with me after class or during my office hours during the first two weeks of class. More information about documenting or addressing learning disabilities is available from Nancy Mott, Director of the Office of Learning Services (tel. x9-5636 or e-mail nancy.mott@villanova.edu) or from that office’s web site.
Topic/Reading Schedule
The assigned reading for each seminar is listed immediately below the seminar theme. A brief and by no means exhaustive listing of related books is included in the gray-shaded area following the weekly assignment. In addition to completing the assigned book, read through your classmates’ brief essays (posted online) responding to the book before coming to the seminar. Please bring your book to class.
June 3	Setting the Stage
	Reading: Fritzsche
	Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2000. Fischer, Fritz. Germany’s aims in the First World War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Georg Iggers. The German conception of history: the national tradition of historical thought from Herder to the present. Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press [1968]. ------. Historiography in the 20th century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe’s twentieth century. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
June 10	Years of Crisis? The Weimar Republic
	Reading: Peukert
	Swett, Pamela. Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fritzsche, Peter. “Review Article: Did Weimar Fail?” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 68, No. 3. (Sep., 1996), pp. 629-656. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds.. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
June 17	The Nazi Revolution
	Reading: Bergerson
	Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945. Rev. ed. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984. Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2003.
June 24	FILM: Architecture of Doom (1989)
	Crew, David, ed. Nazism and German Society 1933-1945. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin, 2005. Peukert, Detlev J. K. Inside Nazi Germany: conformity, opposition, and racism in everyday life. Trans. Richard Deveson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Johnson, Eric A. and Karl-Heinz Reuband. What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
July 1	Perpetrating mass murder
	Reading: Browning and Goldhagen
	Bartov, Omer. Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Eley, Geoff. The “Goldhagen Effect”:History, memory, Nazism—Facing the Gemran Past. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Gross, Jan T. Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. H-German discussion of Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
July 8	Surviving the Holocaust
	Reading: Kluger
	Borowski, Tadeusz. This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Trans. Barbara Vedder. New York: Penguin, 1976. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness. 2 vols. Trans. Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1998 and 1999.
July 15	Nazism, morality, and Christianity
	Reading: Steigmann-Gall
	Bergen, Doris L. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Scholder, Klaus. A Requiem for Hitler: and other New Perspectives on the German Church Struggle. Trans. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1989. Bethge, Eberhard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography. Trans. Eric Mosbacher, et al. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.
July 22	History, Ethics, Resistance
	Reading: Boyer/Geyer
	Robert Braun , “The Holocaust and Problems of Historical Representation,” History and Theory 33, no. 2. (May, 1994), pp. 172-197. Broszat and Saul Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicisation of National Socialism’, in New German Critique, 44 (1988) p. 109 Conference report: Remapping the German Past: Grand Narrative, Causality, and Postmodernism Saul Friedländer, ‘Some Reflections on the Historicisation of National Socialism’, in Peter Baldwin (ed), Reworking the Past. Hitler p. 88-101. Forum: The Historikerstreit Twenty Years On.” German History 24, no. 4 (2006): 587-607. H-German Discussion of Postmodernism (May 1995) Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pendas, Devin O. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963-1965: Genocide, History, and The Limits of the Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.