LOVE YOUR BOOKSHOP DAY: PROMOTIONS
Janosch Steuwer is a historian of modern Germany and Europe. After positions at Universities of Bochum and Zurich, he is working at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. His research interests cover a wide range of topics, such as the history of childhood since the 1970s and the history of National Socialism and its aftermath. In particular, he is concerned with the ways in which ordinary people experienced and understood the periods they lived through.
""This is a genuinely remarkable book. The thinking behind it is sophisticated and well-founded, offering a telling portrait of popular responses to Nazi Germany.""—Mark Roseman, Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, Indiana University ""Janosch Steuwer's magnificent and original analysis of keeping a diary probes the way individuals composed themselves during the Nazi period as they negotiated the push and pull of collective exuberance while ostensibly remaining true to themselves. This is a story not of the Nazi seizure of power but of the Nazi seizure of the self, a story not of coercion but of desire.""—Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, author of An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler ""Janosch Steuwer powerfully analyzes that Nazism was shaped by Germans who strove to define their own place within it. His path-breaking book, based on a numerous contemporary diaries, should be of interest to all historians of European dictatorships""—Moritz Föllmer, University of Amsterdam, author of Culture in the Third Reich ""A milestone for the history of experience and emotions of the Third Reich.""—Michael Wildt, Humboldt University of Berlin, author of Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion ""How did ordinary Germans buy in to the Nazi regime? This question has fascinated and baffled historians for more years, usually producing answers which couple opportunism, peer pressure and fear. Sifting carefully through a large number of diaries, Janosch Steuwer offers the first answer to this question based consistently on the subjective sources produced by individuals themselves. Self-fashioning, wilful ignorance and projecting their own wishes onto the regime all come to the fore here, giving a far more nuanced and also much more morally and emotionally active sense of how Germans persuaded themselves that this was their government. A tremendous achievement and a must read book in the field.""—Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-45
