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Europe: Early Modern and Modern general operations of the Nazi state. While Wetzell demonstrates that most criminologists did not agree with Nazi racist and anti-Semitic views on crime, his focus on academie discourse and disagreement allows him to avoid confronting fully the failure of German criminologists, as members of the country's intellectual and professional elite, to take a more critical stance on ethical grounds against a regime that systematically destroyed the lives of millions of people. As it is, he argues that the fact that "mainstream criminological research" was not in line with Nazi racism shows that "normal science" (p. 205) was widely practiced in the Third Reich. This is true, and Wetzell also rightly observes at the end of his book that the practice of "normal science" in Nazi Germany is a warning about the dangers of modern science. But Wetzell confines his criticism to those criminologists such as Arthur GUtt, Ernst Rdin, and Robert Ritter who collaborated extensively with brutal Nazi programs to eliminate "racial undesirables." Unlike Proctor, Ulfried Geuter, and others who have written on the history of professions in Nazi Germany in institutional as well as intellectual terms, Wetzell does not also criticize the mainstream criminologists whom he holds up as a model to their opportunistic and racist colleagues, for their own indirect support of the regime, confining himself to praising "the sophistication of psychiatrie and criminological research [that] gave rise to serious objections to the sterilization of criminals on the basis of criminal behavior" (p. 305). Wetzell's book is solidly researched and clearly organized and written. A broader institutional focus, however, would allow for a closer examination of the degrees to which scholarly disagreement with Nazi attitudes and polities toward criminals might—but also might not—have prompted action against the regime and on behalf of at least some of its victims. GEOFFREY COCKS Albion College MICHAEL A. MEYER, editor. German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Volume 4, Renewal and Destruction: 1918-1945. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 479. $50.00. The fourth and final volume of German-Jewish History in Modern Times traces German Jewry from its highest achievements of equality and acculturation in the Weimar Republic to its destruction by the Nazis. Two respected Israeli scholars, Avraham Barkai and Paul Mendes-Flohr, synthesize more than fifty years of research by dozens of scholars working in several languages. The result is a clearly organized and lucidly written summary that is accessible to all, including those approaching the subject for the first time. Throughout, the authors compare the Jewish communities in Germany proper with those in Austria and the Czech lands, further enhancing the volume's usefulness. A succinct epilogue by Steven M. Lowenstein on the German Jewish diaspora documents the emigrante' AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1487 preservation of the German language and German cultural habits in various corners of the world for a generation after the Holocaust. Although the authors show that the reality of Nazi rule came as a terrific shock to the German Jews, they argue that developments during the republican period to some degree prepared Jewry for the ensuing onslaught of discrimination and persecution. The chapters devoted to cultural issues, all by Mendes-Flohr, argue that in the 1920s there was a deepening of Jewish identities in reaction to anti-Semitism, Zionism, and contacts with Eastern European Jews. A process of dissimilation was evident in renewed interest in Jewish studies, scholarly and popular publications, art and music, and theology. This renaissance of Jewish culture prepared Jews to engage in spiritual resistance after 1933 and enabled them to develop a new sense of solidarity as their cultural life was ghettoized by the German state. The argument is plausible, but it is difficult to know how widely any cultural rebirth was feit before 1933. In fact, its greatest impact probably came later, when Jews sought refuge from the storm in their religious communities. It might be added that the very success of Jewish culture in shielding the victims from the worst effects of Nazi racism contributed to the ambivalente many of them feit about the wisdom of emigrating. As the authors point out, the Jews' illusory hopes for the future were just as important as restrictions on immigration in slowing departure from Germany. Barkai, who treats most of the other topics covered in the volume, credits Weimar Jewry with elaborating a system of communal institutions that proved invaluable during the dark years that followed. This was particularly true of the Jewish schools and charitable organizations established by local Jewish communities. These at first enabled the Jews to cope with unfavorable economie trends and with anti-Semitism, which Barkai (but not Mendes-Flohr) portrays as endemie throughout the Weimar and Nazi periods. Less successfui is Barkai's analysis of the political culture of the organized Jewish community that gave rise to these institutions during the Weimar Republic. Although the author clearly delineates the complex factionalism within the various secular and religious groupings, he glosses over ideological strife and privileges the position of the Zionists in his reconstruction of events. From Barkai, one would never learn that German Zionism strove militantly and consistently to alienate Germany's Jews from their liberal and patriotic traditions. This both handed ammunition to the antiSemites and undermined self-defense programs, driving the liberal Jewish majority to distraction and tearing German Jewry apart. In reducing this ideological confrontation to a chiefly political one between a stodgy establishment and youthful progressives for control of local community budgets and institutions, Barkai drains much of the lifeblood from the interval history of German Jewry during the Weimar years. Under Adolf Hitler, political convergence among the OCTOBER 2001 Reviews of Books 1488 Jews was unavoidable once all hope for the future was dashed. Even before that happened, leading Jews, for the first time ever, came together to establish a central organization representing most of their coreligionists. In some of the finest passages in the book, Barkai shows how the Nazis turned it into an instrument of official policies aimed at isolation, deportation, and, ultimately, destruction. He wisely refrains from condemning Jewish leaders who cooperated with Nazi officials, both in Germany and in Theresienstadt. Most of them were, he concludes, honorable men placed in impossible circumstances. Although the volume is, for the most part, factually accurate, there are a few lapses. These include the identification of the "black Reichswehr" as Weimar Germany's legal army (p. 49) and of Franz Oppenheimer as expressing Zionist views well after his break with Jewish nationalism (p. 160). It is also to be hoped that the practice of translating the German word völkïsch (meaning "populist," "racist," and/or "nationalist") as "Volkist" (meaningless in English) will go no further. DONALD L. NIEWYK Southern Methodist University GARETH PRITCHARD. The Making of the GDR 1945-53: From Antifascism to Stalinism. New York: Manchester University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 244. $74.95. Shortly before the unexpected opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, several researchers at Mannheim's Institute for the Study of East Germany admitted in discussion that little could be added to their basic outline of the German Democratie Republic's (GDR) history. They nevertheless were impatient to get their hands on inaccessible archives, because these might shed light on the deeper dynamics of change in East German history, especially the dialectics of rulersubject relations. Eleven years later, Gareth Pritchard presents a work that accomplishes precisely what these scholars hoped for: by using previously unexploited materials—many culled from archives in the southern working-class regions of Thuringia and Saxony—he adds new dimensions to our understanding of East German history, especially of the foundational period 1945-1953. The deeper dynamic that Pritchard pursues is the "interaction of the German and Sovjet traditions of Socialism and the transformation of the labor movement from a representative organ of the East German working class to an abject tool of the Communist dictatorship" (p. 6). Although his primary sources focus on workers, his narrative ranges broadly from denazification to land reform to the reemergence of political life, especially via antifascist committees and workplace councils. Contrary to visions of spontaneous worker activism in earlier Western treatments, Pritchard insists on the centrality of organization: the German Communist Party (KPD) more carefully controlled worker councils than previously assumed (pp. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 48-49). In concluding chapters he depicts the Stalinization of the East German workers' movement, paying particular attention to the suppression of independent activity at the base. Dictatorship burgeoned in order to counter popular resistance to the regimentation of economie and political life, and gradually the antifascist idealism of the early postwar period yielded to fear of denunciation. By 1950, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) had become alienated from a population in which it had once enjoyed genuine support. To reach these conclusions, Pritchard masterfully interweaves materials from professional journals, memoirs, interview protocols, diaries, Eastern and Western historical interpretations, as well as a wide range of state and party archives. Especially illuminating in the deployment of such sources are the book's central sections on the fusing of the KPD and Social Democratie Party (SPD) to produce the SED in April 1946. This was a time of complex and conflicting sentiments in the rank and file of both parties, in which determination to survive might lapse into opportunism, or hope bom of liberation rapidly give way to resignation under the pressures of military occupation. The one broadly held and unshakable conviction concerned the need for working-class unity after twelve years of Nazi rule. Pritchard's approach thus explodes the two dimensional "compulsion-free will" scheme that characterizes even more nuanced work on the subject, but his documents leave no doubt as to the forces that ultimately assured "worker unity." Most memorable are the unembroidered descriptions of methods used to assure the Communist takeover: for example, the systematic favoring of compliant SPD politicians with better rations (p. 113), or the "use" of compromising material against a Social Democratie "enemy ... in order to put him under pressure." The latter story is then connected to one Social Democrat's recollection of a telephone conversation in which a Sovjet officer threatened to "crush him like a piece of dirt"(p. 114). Pritchard's judgments appear solid and original within the framework of East German history, but difficulties arise when he attempts to embed them in broader contexts of space and time. With little consideration of relevant sources, the author supposes that limited purging in the upper ranks of the SED reflected greater "resistance" to Stalinism in East Germany, deriving from the fact that the "German labor movement was the oldest in the world . . . and had deeper roots and longer traditions than its Polish, Czech or Hungarian counterparts" (p. 182). Of course quite the opposite is the case: East Germany was the one place where the party failed to produce a serious challenge to Stalinism, even when that was explicitly sanctioned by Moscow. Furthermore, the bloody purging in Poland was an index of native resistance, which even took the form of civil war in the early postwar period. Contrasts of this sort suggest that students of resistance are better advised to examine the confron- OCTOBER 2001