Visions of Community in Nazi Germany

This volume offers a comprehensive collection of studies on social engineering by the state in Nazi Germany. It examines the concept of Volksgemeinschaft - 'the people's community' - as the Nazis' central vision of community during the Nazi regime.

Martina Steber is Gerda-Henkel-Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg, Munich, 2012/13, where she is completing her habilitation on political languages of Conservatism in Britain and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 2012 she has been based at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich. From 2007 to 2012 she was Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute, London, after receiving her PhD. from the University of Augsburg. Her first book Ethnische Gewissheiten: Die Ordnung des Regionalen im bayerischen Schwaben vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (2010) is an enquiry into the significance of regionality in German political culture from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi Regime. She is currently completing an edited collection with Riccardo Bavaj, which scrutinizes German ideas of 'the West' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Bernhard Gotto is research fellow at the Institut fÃ-r Zeitgeschichte, Munich. In 2006 he published Nationalsozialistische Kommunalpolitik: Administrative NormalitÃ-t und Systemstabilisierung durch die Augsburger Stadtverwaltung 1933-1945, which reevaluates the impact of urban administration in Nazi Germany. As well as several books on economic history in the 20th century, he has co-edited two volumes on crisis and the perception of crisis in Germany and France in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 2012 he has coordinated a Leibniz Graduate School on Disappointment in the 20th Century. His current research project scrutinizes the effects of disappointment on democracy in West Germany from 1960 to 1989.

- Preface
- Glossary
- 1: Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto: Volksgemeinschaft: Writing the Social History of the Nazi Regime
- Part I: Volksgemeinschaft: Controversies
- 2: Ian Kershaw: Volksgemeinschaft: Potential and Limitations of the Concept
- 3: Michael Wildt: Volksgemeinschaft: A Modern Perspective on National Socialist Society
- 4: Ulrich Herbert: Echoes of the Volksgemeinschaft
- Part II: A New Frame of Reference: Ideology, Administrative Practices, and Social Control
- 5: Lutz Raphael: Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung
- 6: Armin Nolzen: The NSDAP's Operational Codes after 1933
- 7: Thomas Schaarschmidt: Mobilizing German Society for War: The National Socialist Gaue
- 8: Jane Caplan: Registering the Volksgemeinschaft: Civil Status in Nazi Germany 1933-9
- 9: Gerhard Wolf: Exporting Volksgemeinschaft: The Deutsche Volksliste in Annexed Upper Silesia
- Part III: The Individual and the Regime: The Promises of Volksgemeinschaft
- 10: Andreas Wirsching: Volksgemeinschaft and the Illusion of 'Normality' from the 1920s to the 1940s
- 11: Birthe Kundrus: Greasing the Palm of the Volksgemeinschaft? Consumption under National Socialism
- 12: Nicole Kramer: Volksgenossinnen on the German Home Front: An Insight into Nazi Wartime Society
- 13: Frank Bajohr: 'Community of Action' and Diversity of Attitudes: Reflections on Mechanisms of Social Integration in National Socialist Germany, 1933-45
- 14: RÃ-diger Hachtmann: Social Spaces of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft in the Making: Functional Elites and Club Networking
- Part IV: Volksgemeinschaft: A Rationale for Violence
- 15: Christopher R. Browning: The Holocaust: Basis and Objective of the Volksgemeinschaft?
- 16: Sven Keller: Volksgemeinschaft and Violence: Some Reflections on Interdependencies
- 17: Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann: Social Control and the Making of the Volksgemeinschaft
- Part V: The Limits of Volksgemeinschaft Policies
- 18: Johannes HÃ-rter: The Military Elite and Volksgemeinschaft
- 19: Willi Oberkrome: National Socialist Blueprints for Rural Communities and their Resonance in Agrarian Society
- 20: Richard Bessel: The End of the Volksgemeinschaft
- Bibliography